Satire
Our Velocity Is Up Forty Percent. Nothing Has Shipped.
The sprint completion rate looks excellent. The product roadmap does not.
After a string of missed deadlines, the CTO mandates an 80% sprint completion rate reported to the board. Goodhart's Law was not included in the board pack.
What Actually Happens
Teams adapt. Stories are decomposed into the smallest completable unit. "Deploy feature X to staging" becomes four tickets: create branch, write tests, open PR, merge. Velocity doubles in six weeks. Sprint completion reaches 91%. The dashboard is green.
Three quarters pass. No significant feature ships. The product roadmap shows everything "in progress." The engineering team is completing sprints at record pace. The retrospective action item is to "improve story decomposition further."
At the quarterly business review, the CTO presents the velocity chart — up and to the right. The product team presents the feature delivery chart. It is flat. Both charts are accurate.
“You moved the scoreboard. The game did not move with it.”
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Let's talk architecture →How a Builder Should Respond
Measure outcomes, not activity. If you must use a proxy metric, define what behaviour it's supposed to drive, then observe what behaviour it actually drives — those are rarely the same thing. Rotate proxy metrics before anyone optimises for them. The moment a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring what you wanted to know.
This scenario illustrates Goodhart's Law. See all 13 laws →
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