Agile Mentors Podcast from Mountain Goat Software

#180: Why Velocity Is the Wrong Metric for Leadership with Scott Dunn

May 6, 2026

Scott Dunn, a Certified Enterprise Coach with 20+ years helping organizations like NASA and eBay, joins to challenge using velocity as a leadership score. They unpack why leaders cling to a single number, how velocity hides strategic uncertainty, and ways to pair metrics with outcomes. AI’s speed-up makes outcome-focused experiments and quick feedback even more urgent.

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INSIGHT

Velocity Encourages Gaming And Unsafe Behavior

Velocity becomes gamed when managers pressure teams to increase it, producing inflated estimates and unsafe behavior.
Scott recounts teams inflating story points and management praising higher numbers, which masks real delivery.

ANECDOTE

Team Protest By Inflating Story Points

Teams sometimes parody the metric by inflating estimates to absurd values to protest unfair comparisons.
Brian Milner recalls Mike's story of a team adding a million to each story point to show how meaningless cross-team comparisons are.

ADVICE

Use Points For Predictability Not Performance

Use story points for predictability, not performance ranking; couple them with cycle time and lead time metrics.
Scott recommends points for team forecasting and cycle/lead time to improve process speed and predictability.

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Velocity can help a team plan, but it creates problems when leaders use it to judge performance. In this episode, Brian Milner and Scott Dunn explain why that shift happens so often and what leaders should pay attention to instead.

Overview

Velocity is one of the most misunderstood metrics in Agile. Used well, it helps a team forecast and make planning decisions. Used poorly, it becomes a productivity score that encourages inflated estimates, unhealthy comparisons, and a focus on output rather than value.

In this episode, Brian and Scott discuss why leaders often reach for velocity, why it gives them the wrong signal, and how teams can reconnect measurement to outcomes, learning, and business impact. They also explore how AI is making this issue more urgent by increasing delivery speed while putting even more pressure on leaders to ask whether teams are building the right things.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Scott Dunn
#35: Metrics with Lance Dacy
Rethink the Refinement Session: Less Time, Better Outcomes by Mike Cohn
The Cost of Change Curve Is Outdated by Mike Cohn
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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Scott Dunn is a Certified Enterprise Coach and Scrum Trainer with over 20 years of experience coaching and training companies like NASA, EMC/Dell Technologies, Yahoo!, Technicolor, and eBay to transition to an agile approach using Scrum.