When Velocity Charts Go Up and Revenue Stays Flat: Connecting Every Sprint to the P&L
If you can't trace a line from your last Sprint Review to your quarterly earnings, you're running a feature factory. A high-performing team building the wrong thing is a liability, not an asset.
Velocity charts trending upward. Sprint commitments met. And yet—revenue targets missed, customer satisfaction stagnant. This is the feature factory trap: organizations that perfect delivery mechanics while losing sight of why they're delivering.
This echoes what I call "false branding" in Strategic Honesty—projecting an image that doesn't match reality. Like the Nepalese proverb, "Eating a potato but boasting to be eating sweets," feature factories look productive on reports but fail the fundamental test of business impact.
The Failure Mode: Bloatware and Wasted Investment
Studies show 50-80% of product features are rarely or never used. Every unused feature carries ongoing maintenance costs—testing, security, documentation. The more you add, the harder the product becomes to maintain, the more capacity goes toward keeping lights on rather than creating value.
As I explore in Strategic Honesty, shortcuts accumulate debt. Shipping without validation is the organizational equivalent of "get-rich-quick schemes"—it feels productive but traps teams in networks of unused code that drain future capacity.
The Intervention: Evidence-Based Management
The alternative isn't shipping less—it's shipping smarter. Adopt Evidence-Based Management (EBM) to measure value across four dimensions: Current Value, Unrealized Value, Time-to-Market, and Ability to Innovate. Replace feature-based roadmaps with outcome-based roadmaps. Instead of "Build recommendation engine," state "Increase repeat purchases by 15%."
When teams operate this way, "failure" changes meaning. A feature customers don't adopt isn't waste—it's validated learning. Organizations develop capacity to pivot without trauma because pivoting responds to evidence, not admitting defeat.
This parallels a principle from both my books: "Feedback is the breakfast of champions." Organizations treating customer data as the ultimate arbiter of value develop what I call in Unlocking Integrity-Centered Leadership a "Growth Mindset"—viewing every release as a learning opportunity, embracing failure as teacher rather than fearing it.
The Strategic Scrum Master
A Strategic Scrum Master operates as a partner to the Product Owner, not a servant to the backlog. They challenge assumptions about value, insist on outcome metrics, and ensure "we shipped it" is never the end—"and here's what we learned" always follows.
As both Strategic Honesty and Unlocking Integrity-Centered Leadership make clear, authentic success requires brutal self-honesty about whether activities create genuine value. The mantra "Be Good. Do Good. Do Well" applies to organizations: doing good (creating real customer value) is prerequisite for doing well (business success). Feature factories reverse this, pursuing high output while neglecting whether that output does any good.
Cost centers ship features and measure output. Value drivers ship outcomes and measure impact. The transformation isn't working harder—it's connecting every sprint to the P&L, replacing "what did we build?" with "what value did we create?"
Stop building feature factories. Start building value engines.
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Gopu Shrestha is a Senior Agile Executive and author of Strategic Honesty: How to be Good and Rich and Unlocking Integrity-Centered Leadership.
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