Stop Measuring the Wrong Things: The Real Markers of High-Performing Teams
How to identify and build teams that deliver outcomes, not just outputs
Teams shipping 47% more features while customer churn climbs. Engineering velocity charts trending upward as user satisfaction drops. Deployment frequency hitting record highs while business value stays flat. This disconnect shows we're measuring the wrong things entirely.
We count what's easy: story points, features shipped, bugs fixed. These numbers feel safe because they're concrete. But after 25 years building teams, I can tell you they mean almost nothing.
I watched a team hit 120% velocity for three quarters straight. Management loved them. Then we dug deeper—they were shipping features nobody used. They'd gotten so good at delivering that they'd stopped asking what was worth building.
Same quarter, different team. The payments group everyone thought was slow spent three months on one feature. One. It reduced transaction failures by 8% and saved $2.3M that year. The difference? They cared about impact, not activity.
Most companies track engineering, product, and design in separate buckets. Finance puts them in different cost centers. Reviews happen in silos. You know what this gets you? Teams optimizing their own metrics while the business suffers.
Real high-performing teams include everyone who touches the value stream. Engineers, designers, PMs—sure. But also QA, security, and yes, sometimes legal and compliance. When our medical device team made clinical advisors full members instead of consultants, feature delivery got faster. Why? Because safety validation happened during development, not after.
The boundaries get messy. At one point, I had a compliance officer basically living with the fintech team. Was she "on the team" or not? Didn't matter. What mattered was this: they owned success together. No finger-pointing. No "that's not my job." Just shared accountability for outcomes.
What Actually Defines High Performance
Twenty-five years in, and I've seen the same patterns in every exceptional team I've built or inherited:
They own the whole outcome. Not just shipping code. A payment processing team I worked with didn't celebrate when features went live. They celebrated when transaction success rates improved and revenue targets hit. Big difference.
They kill dependencies, not work around them. Best example: a team that started with every single change needing legal review. Every one. Six months later? They'd built guidelines with legal that let them self-certify 90% of changes. They didn't complain about the constraint—they eliminated it.
They make everything visible. One platform team publishes a quarterly doc: "Here's what we're building. Here's what we're explicitly NOT building." No surprises. When priorities shift mid-quarter, everyone sees exactly what gets cut.
They bet and measure. The team building our Ontario healthcare platform would write: "We think adding feature X will reduce appointment no-shows by 15%." Then they'd measure actual impact. First year, they were terrible at predictions—off by 50% or more. By year two? Within 10% accuracy. That skill changed everything about how we planned.
They work normal hours. The fastest team I ever ran left at 5 PM. Every day. No heroics, no death marches. They could do this because they'd removed so much friction from their process. If your team needs heroes, your system is broken.
Here's what nobody tells you: perfect measurement is impossible. I've tried everything—OKRs, balanced scorecards, frameworks I'm embarrassed to name. They all break somehow.
The teams that get this right build their own metrics. Your platform team faces different challenges than your mobile team. Your API team has constraints your web team doesn't. One set of metrics for everyone? That's how you get dysfunction.
We landed on something simple: everyone tracks basics (how often you deploy, how often things break, how long work takes). Then each team adds their own outcome metrics based on what their customers actually need.
The breakthrough came when we started treating improvements like currency. Cut build time by 10 minutes? That's an hour saved per developer per week. Eight developers? You just created a full day of capacity. Now teams could make smart trade-offs between different kinds of improvements.
You need both leading and lagging indicators. Deployment frequency tells you about team health today. Customer metrics tell you if you delivered value last quarter. Neither gives you the full picture alone.
Stories from the Field
That legal dependency story deserves more detail. The team spent a week categorizing every change from the previous year. They found clear patterns—certain changes never had issues. They proposed three categories: green (no review), yellow (team reviews against checklist), red (full legal review).
Legal was skeptical. Fair enough. So the team suggested a pilot—three months, with ability to roll back instantly if anything went wrong. After three months of zero issues on green changes, legal was convinced. The time saved let lawyers focus on actually complex problems instead of rubber-stamping routine updates.
Another game-changer: measuring "time to value" instead of "time to deploy." Sounds simple. It's not. One team discovered their average feature took three weeks after deployment before users even found it. Three weeks! They were celebrating production deployments while features died in obscure menus. Once they saw this, they rebuilt their entire navigation approach.
My favourite remains prediction tracking. Watching teams get better at calling their shots was like watching a pitcher develop control. Early on: "This might help with conversion, maybe?" A year later: "This will increase mobile checkout completion by 12-15%." And they'd nail it. That confidence—earned through practice—transformed how we made investment decisions.
Expensive Mistakes
Let me save you some pain. I pushed a team hard for Q4 numbers once. They delivered—by cutting every corner possible. Took six months to clean up the mess. Worse, two senior engineers left. Short-term thinking kills teams.
Individual metrics in team sports don't work. I tried stack-ranking engineers by commits. You know what happened? Collaboration died. The best code often comes from pairing where one person gets the commit. Who cares who typed it if the team delivers value?
Don't copy metrics between different teams. Platform teams building tools need different measures than growth teams running experiments. I tried standardizing once. Lasted two months before the revolt. They were right to push back.
Watch for gaming. I saw a team split every feature into tiny stories to juice their velocity numbers. They made their process worse to make metrics look better. The second metrics become targets, they stop measuring anything useful.
Making It Real
After all this talk about measurement, lets realize something: the best teams barely look at their metrics. They're too busy solving real problems for real users.
Metrics are instruments, not destinations. Like a pilot uses altitude and airspeed to navigate, not to define where they're going. Teams obsessing over velocity rarely achieve escape velocity. Teams focused on user problems consistently deliver on every metric that matters.
So what do you do tomorrow? Start with clarity. What specific value does your team create? Not generic "we build features" but actual value only your team can deliver. Work backward from there. What behaviors create that value? What indicates those behaviors are happening?
Then—and this is critical—stay loose. The metrics that matter when you're finding product-market fit aren't the ones that matter when you're scaling. High-performing teams revisit their measures regularly. They treat them as tools, not doctrine.
What I've learned after building teams across three industries and two decades: you can't measure your way to high performance. But you can create conditions where engaged people working toward meaningful goals consistently deliver exceptional results. The metrics just help you know it's happening.
The question isn't whether your teams are shipping more. It's whether they're creating more value. And in a world obsessed with velocity charts and story points, that's the only measurement that matters.