Story Point Velocity is a Terrible Scorecard Metric

Story point based velocity is a terrible "score card" metric to measure how product development is doing. Way too many teams are using it as a primary measure of progress.

You don't actually know what a velocity of 70 means in terms of customer impact or business value created as a result of the very real cost of the team for that time.

Story points are made up, and AI tooling changes the meaning of what's a 2 point task and what's a 13 point task.

With most teams seeing a real but not yet transformational impact with AI tools, bad measures are making it even harder to answer what you're getting for your investment.

Here are the most straightforward things to measure that in my experience can get you moving in a better direction:

How long does it take to finish each item of work from start to finish, and ideally finished = released or releasable? (Cycle Time)

How many meaningful items of work were completed in the relevant time period? (Throughput)

How much of a target change in behavior did you see from your customers and / or prospects that you expect to lead to positive outcomes (task completion, activation, retention, pipeline movement, etc) after release? These are your best leading indicators of product success.

Story points can be a good tool for helping get better at estimates, making realistic sprint commitments, and understanding what needs broken down and refined further.

The measurements above can get you started on a better understanding of how much progress you're actually making.

It does take hard work and good judgement to pick the right leading indicators.

But if you do a good job, you can actually tell what the impact of your choices are, including adding + refining AI tools at different steps in your process.

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