You manage an engineering team delivering features and platform work for a B2B commerce and digital experience product. Over the last 2 quarters, story points completed rose from 210 to 290 per sprint, but customer-reported defects increased from 18 to 31 per month, average cycle time moved from 9.5 days to 11.2 days, and on-time delivery slipped from 87% to 79%. Leadership says output is up, but you are not convinced the team is actually improving over time.
How would you define and measure whether the team is improving in a way that reflects both delivery speed and engineering quality, and how would you diagnose which signals matter most before recommending changes?