You are an engineering manager leading a team building internal talent-matching and client delivery workflows for a B2B services platform. Over the last two quarters, your team increased output from 18 to 31 story points completed per sprint and shipped 9 major workflow changes, but key business results barely moved: qualified match acceptance improved only from 71% to 72%, time-to-fill stayed flat at 12 days, and 90-day client retention slipped from 88% to 85%. Leadership is concerned the team is optimizing for throughput rather than customer and business impact, especially after a recent push to accelerate delivery velocity.
How would you define and operationalize outcome-focused metrics for this team, and how would you investigate whether current engineering work is actually improving business performance rather than just increasing output?