A good measurement culture where numbers don’t replace common sense
In the last engineering team I managed (by far the most successful one up to date), we discarded most velocity measures in favour of a simple solution: every Friday, each team sends a brief "here's what we delivered this week" email to the whole company. It contains some screenshots and instructions like "agents can now update the foobar rate from their mobile app without having to call in". After a month or two of these going out like clockwork, it gave both management and business stakeholders a level of comfort that no amount of KPI dashboards ever could. KPIs compress away details that stakeholders need to form an understanding. A full blast from the task tracker is overkill. This solution worked for us. But of course, required a solid feature flag practice so that half-built features (story slices) could be released weekly for testing without affecting production. That said, we did maintain a quarter-level sum-of-t-shirt-size based KPI.