We’ve all been there. Leadership wants to know, ‘How can we increase developer productivity?’ The conversation quickly turns to metrics like velocity, cycle time, or the number of features shipped per quarter. But this often feels like ‘productivity theater’—measuring motion, not impact.
Focusing solely on output metrics can create the wrong incentives. It can push teams to prioritize easy-to-build, low-value features over complex, high-impact ones, just to keep the numbers up. It creates a factory mindset where the goal is to assemble widgets faster, rather than solve real customer problems.
The real challenge is shifting the conversation from outputs to outcomes. Instead of asking ‘How many story points did we complete?’, we should be asking, ‘Did we move our key business metric? Did we improve user satisfaction? Did we reduce churn?’ This isn’t easy. It requires educating stakeholders and aligning everyone around a new definition of ‘done’—one that’s tied to customer value, not just code deployed.
How do you handle the pressure for output-based metrics while trying to steer your team towards customer-centric outcomes?