The Illusion of Velocity
On the critical difference between motion and progress
Directive
In your next stand-up or planning meeting, pause the discussion on how fast you're shipping and ask one question about a key initiative: "What evidence do we have that this is moving us closer to our customer's desired outcome?"
Why It Matters
We love our burndown charts. We celebrate closed tickets and fast deploys. But activity can be a seductive vanity metric. It's like rocking furiously in a rocking chair—it feels like you're moving, but you're not actually going anywhere. The most dangerous teams aren't the slow ones; they're the fast ones running diligently in the wrong direction. They burn themselves out building perfectly engineered features that solve no one's problem. Taking a moment to check the compass is more important than flooring the accelerator. A five-minute conversation that realigns the team is infinitely more valuable than an extra hundred lines of code aimed at the wrong target.
Action Item
Here’s how to make that conversation productive, not confrontational:
Pick Your Target: Before the meeting, choose one high-effort project to focus on. Don't derail the entire meeting by questioning everything.
Frame with Praise: Acknowledge the team's hard work first. Try saying, "The velocity on Project X is impressive. To make sure all this great work lands with maximum impact, let's quickly sanity-check our assumptions."
Focus on Evidence: When you ask the question, steer the team toward concrete data. Is it a key metric from an A/B test? A direct quote from a recent customer interview? If the evidence is thin, the action becomes: "What's the smallest thing we can ship to get that evidence?"
Words to Work By
"If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster." – Stephen R. Covey
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