The Velocity Trap: How Goodhart's Law Derails IT Projects

You know that project. The one where everything looks perfect on paper. Velocity charts climbing, burndown slopes diving, tickets closing left and right. Every dashboard screams "success!" in bright green.

Meanwhile, your dev team's burning out. Stakeholders are muttering about something feeling "off" with the product. That feature you delivered right on schedule? Users hate it.

There's a name for this disconnect between what we measure and what actually matters. An economist named Charles Goodhart figured it out decades ago: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

This is Goodhart's Law, and it's quietly sabotaging IT projects everywhere. In our data-obsessed world, it's the bug we can't seem to patch.

What Goodhart's Law Actually Means

Here's the deal: the moment you start measuring something, people's behavior changes. They'll optimize for the metric instead of the thing you're trying to improve. The number becomes the goal, not what the number was supposed to represent.

Classic scenario: your team gets judged on closed bug tickets. Sounds reasonable, right? Better software quality through more bug fixes. But watch what happens. They'll knock out ten easy typos while ignoring that one nasty race condition that's been crashing servers. They'll close tickets prematurely, knowing they'll probably reopen them later. The metric looks amazing. The software? Still broken.

This isn't some abstract theory. It's the "Cobra Effect" in action - named after that time the British government in India offered bounties for dead cobras. People started breeding cobras just to collect the reward. Same energy, different century. That's an interesting story for another time!

From Banking to Burndown Charts

Goodhart first spotted this pattern in the 1970s at the Bank of England. The government tried controlling inflation by targeting specific money supply metrics. Banks immediately started gaming the system, moving money around to hit the targets while completely missing the point of fighting inflation.

What started as an economic observation turned out to be a universal truth about human behavior. And nowhere does it thrive quite like in the metrics-heavy world of Agile development.

The Velocity Trap in Action

Velocity is supposed to be a planning tool. It helps teams predict how much work they can realistically handle. But the second a manager says, "We need 10% more velocity this quarter," it becomes a target. Game over.

Now your team's inflating story points. Breaking simple features into microscopic tasks that don't add up to anything meaningful. The velocity number goes up, management's happy, but you're not actually delivering faster. You're just better at making the chart look good.

Same thing happens everywhere. Push for on-time delivery? Teams cut corners on testing and pile up technical debt. Reward lines of code? You get bloated, inefficient software. In every case, people aren't being malicious - they're just responding to the incentives you've created.

Why We Keep Falling for It

Here's the thing: for stakeholders who aren't in the weeds, a project feels like a black box. Metrics like velocity or ticket counts seem like a perfect window into what's really happening. They offer the illusion of control in a chaotic world.

But there's a massive gap between what stakeholders actually want—a product that works and solves real problems - and what's easy to count. We measure what's convenient instead of what's important. Then we wonder why the numbers look great but the product sucks.

The Real Damage

When you fall into this trap, you don't just get bad data. Teams develop tunnel vision, obsessing over metrics while losing sight of the bigger picture. Quality becomes an afterthought.

This is where technical debt multiplies. To hit that deployment target, teams take shortcuts and promise to "fix it later." Spoiler alert: later never comes. The codebase turns into a house of cards, making every future change slower and more expensive.

The human cost is even worse. Constant pressure to chase arbitrary numbers kills morale, stifles creativity, and destroys the psychological safety teams need to do their best work. Eventually, stakeholders realize the metrics are meaningless, and trust between leadership and the team evaporates.

How to Use Metrics Without Getting Used

The solution isn't to throw out all your data. It's to get smarter about how you use it.

First, never rely on a single metric. Build a balanced scorecard that tells the whole story. Track output metrics like lead time, but balance them with quality indicators like bug escape rates. Layer on outcome metrics—user adoption, customer satisfaction scores. And don't forget team health through regular retrospectives and honest conversations.

Shift your focus from output to outcomes. Instead of asking, "How many story points did we complete?" ask, "What value did we deliver to users?"

Most importantly, treat metrics as diagnostic tools, not weapons. When a number drops, don't start pointing fingers. Get curious. Ask your team, "What's happening here? What is this telling us about our system?"

The Bottom Line

Metrics are tools, not destinations. They're the map, not the territory. A good map is invaluable for navigation, but staring at it won't get you where you need to go.

Your job as a leader isn't to be a metric manager - it's to interpret the data wisely, protect your team from the distortions of metric-driven pressure, and keep everyone focused on what really matters: delivering genuine value.

Take a hard look at your dashboards. Are your metrics lighting the path forward, or just lighting a fire under your team?