The velocity pillar

The velocity pillar

Velocity comes in layers that trade off against each other. The easiest to measure sits furthest from the outcome the business cares about; the one closest to the outcome is the hardest to capture. PR count is the most gameable layer, and story points travel badly between accounts because they mean different things on every team. Pick the layer deliberately and say which trade-off you're making.

Reach past PR count when you can. Feature-completion velocity is harder to instrument, yet it's the only velocity layer that maps cleanly to value the customer experiences. A wall of merged PRs can sit on top of zero shipped features; a completed feature can't be faked the same way.