Velocity Fixation and the Death of Customer Value

Velocity obsession is agile theatre. Lots of charts, no outcomes, and customers still screaming at support.

Let’s have it out: velocity fixation is killing agile.

Teams obsess over it. Middle managers parade it around like it’s proof of life. “We did 50 points this sprint!” they cry, as if their customers actually give a shit. Spoiler: they don’t.

Velocity is not progress. Velocity is not success. Velocity is not even a good metric. It’s a planning aid that somehow got promoted to centre stage. A glorified guesstimate turned KPI. It’s like mistaking the weight of your big shop for how good dinner will taste.

But hey, we’ve all seen the theatre.

The Cult of Meaningless Points

Velocity fixation breeds absurd behaviour. Entire teams start gaming the system because, well, if leadership cares about the number, you’d be stupid not to optimise for the number.

Point Inflation — That 3-point task you did last month? Suddenly it’s an 8. “Our estimation is just more accurate now.” Riiight. And I’m Elon Musk’s dog walker.
Jira Chop-Shop — One button becomes three tickets. “Change button colour” (2 points), “Move button left” (1 point), “Align button vertically” (2 points). Congratulations, you’re now a velocity millionaire.
Bug Blindness — Critical login issue blocking 40% of users? “Sorry, can’t take it this sprint. We’ve already planned exactly the number of points velocity suggests.” Imagine telling your customers: “Yes, you can’t access your account, but hey, at least our sprint commitment is intact!”

“If your sprint review sounds like an auction in story points, you’ve already lost.”

And this is where it gets really toxic: once velocity becomes a target, it ceases to be useful. The system gets gamed, the charts go up, everyone smiles at the stand-up, all while the product is quietly circling the drain.

The Problem With Points

Story points were meant to be relative sizing. A way to say “this is harder than that.” Fine. No problem. But velocity fixation turns them into something else: a pseudo-currency for progress.

And once points become currency, teams hoard them, inflate them, and optimise for them. They forget that customers don’t buy story points. Nobody logs into your app to marvel at your Jira burndown. They’re there to get a job done.

Here’s the kicker:

You can deliver 100 points in a sprint and deliver zero value if it’s the wrong 100 points.
You can deliver 5 points and radically improve your customer’s life if it’s the right 5 points.

Yet, which one looks better in your velocity chart? Exactly.

Velocity Theatre: Real-World Examples

The vanity feature — 40 points spent on filters for a dashboard 2% of users ever open. Product cheers. Customers yawn.
The sprint full excuse — Bug fix that would save a client account? Deferred, because “we’ve no points left.” Short-term velocity saved, long-term trust destroyed.
The arms race — Team A inflates estimates and posts 60 points per sprint. Team B delivers real value at 25 points. Guess which team leadership calls “underperforming”?

This is what I mean by agile theatre: colourful charts, back-slapping ceremonies, and customers still screaming at support.

The Only Metrics That Matter

If you want to measure whether your team is succeeding, stop staring at velocity graphs and start looking at outcomes. Metrics tied to actual value such as:

Activation rate — Did new users get through onboarding without rage-quitting?
Retention — Do they come back, or ghost you after week one?
Time to value — How fast before users see the benefit they signed up for?
Support ticket reduction — Did you remove pain, or just ship new flavours of it?
Business outcomes — Revenue, churn, referrals, customer satisfaction.

“Your customers don’t care if your velocity is 12 or 200. They care if they can log in without screaming.”

I’ve argued the same in QA is a Process, Not a Person: metrics should reflect outcomes, not outputs. Velocity is just the latest output fetish.

Velocity’s Actual Job

Velocity isn’t evil. It’s really useful for:

Before a sprint — Rough planning: how much can we fit in without collapsing?
During a sprint — Surfacing problems: if velocity nosedives mid-sprint, something’s wrong. Maybe stories were underestimated, maybe a blocker appeared.

That’s it. That’s the job.

“Velocity is a planning aid, and an information radiator. Treating it as success is like confusing BMI with health.”

It’s a compass, not a scoreboard. The moment you optimise for it, you’re optimising for circles.

I dug into this further in How to use story points for estimation. When we misuse planning tools as performance metrics, we set teams up to game the system instead of solving real problems.

Outcomes-Based Frameworks: The Grown-Up Alternative

If not velocity, then what? Use frameworks that measure impact, not output.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) — Instead of “ship 50 points,” define an objective like Improve user activation experience. Key results might be increase onboarding completion from 60% to 80% or reduce setup time from 10 minutes to 3. Suddenly, teams are measured by value, not story-point bingo.
North Star Metrics — A single guiding metric that reflects customer and business value. For Spotify it’s time spent listening. For Airbnb it’s nights booked. For your product, it’s whatever correlates directly with delivering value to users.
Outcome roadmaps — Replace feature roadmaps (“build X, Y, Z”) with outcome roadmaps (“reduce churn by 10%,” “increase referral sign-ups by 15%”). This orients delivery around solving problems, not burning points.
DORA Metrics — The DevOps Research and Assessment team gave us four engineering health metrics that actually mean something:
- Deployment Frequency — how often you ship.
- Lead Time for Changes — how fast an idea moves from commit to production.
- Change Failure Rate — how often your changes break things.
- Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) — how quickly you fix it when they do.

“Velocity tells you how busy you were. Outcomes-based frameworks tell you if you made a difference.”

The beauty is this: OKRs, North Star Metrics, and DORA metrics are immune to point inflation. They force the conversation back where it belongs — on users, customers, and impact.

How to Break the Addiction

Stop reporting velocity to management. The second it’s a slide, it’s a target.
Swap outputs for outcomes. Talk in terms of customer and business impact, not abstract units.
Use OKRs and North Star Metrics. Anchor delivery to value, not points.
Call out absurdity. When someone brags about velocity, ask: “Cool. Which user problem did that solve?”

The Ranty Bit

Velocity fixation is agile theatre. It’s cosplay for delivery. It gives you the illusion of progress while your product quietly withers. It’s a comfort blanket for leaders who’d rather stare at colourful charts than ask the terrifying question: are we actually solving customer problems?

And the rituals around it are laughable.

Teams congratulating themselves for “hitting 100% of sprint commitment” while customers scream into the support queue.
Retrospectives where the only “insight” is that maybe you should estimate more generously next time.
Leaders demanding velocity “increases quarter on quarter,” as if doubling your story points magically doubles customer value.

“Velocity fixation is agile theatre: colourful charts, standing ovations, and a product that still can’t do the basics.”

Here’s the ugly truth: nobody outside your bubble cares about your points. Your users don’t log in to admire your sprint burndown. Your investors don’t high-five because you “shipped 60 points.” Your customers don’t care how many tickets you closed — they care whether the damn thing works.

And yet, entire companies have made velocity the centrepiece of delivery reporting. It’s agile’s equivalent of cargo cults: imitate the ceremonies, worship the numbers, and pray that somehow planes full of value will land. Spoiler: they won’t.

The more we fetishise velocity, the more we teach teams to game it. Inflate estimates. Split tickets. Prioritise easy work that burns down nicely instead of gnarly work that actually matters. We reward theatre, not outcomes. And then we wonder why “agile transformations” so often collapse into cynicism.

“A team chasing velocity is just training to run in circles faster. And then clapping when they cross the same finish line, again.”

Velocity fixation isn’t just wasteful. It’s corrosive. It kills trust between teams and leadership. It punishes the teams who are honest in their estimation. It creates perverse incentives where the path of least resistance is to ship the wrong thing quickly instead of the right thing slowly.

And worst of all: it distracts everyone from the only scoreboard that actually matters — outcomes.

Did customers stick around?
Did the product get easier to use?
Did we reduce friction, confusion, pain?
Did the business grow as a result?

If the answer is “no,” then congratulations: your beautiful velocity chart is just lipstick on a very expensive pig.

So let’s stop pretending. Velocity is not a performance metric. It’s not a KPI. It’s not proof of progress. At best, it’s an internal planning aid. At worst, it’s agile’s biggest delusion.

“Points don’t pay the bills. Outcomes do. And until we stop sprinting for story points, we’ll keep sprinting nowhere, faster.”

Gary Worthington is a software engineer, delivery consultant, and agile coach who helps teams move fast, learn faster, and scale when it matters. He writes about modern engineering, product thinking, and helping teams ship things that matter.

Through his consultancy, More Than Monkeys, Gary helps startups and scaleups improve how they build software — from tech strategy and agile delivery to product validation and team development.

Visit morethanmonkeys.co.uk to learn how we can help you build better, faster.

Follow Gary on LinkedIn for practical insights into engineering leadership, agile delivery, and team performance.