You manage an engineering team supporting a B2B SaaS platform, and leadership asks you to show whether the team is genuinely improving over time rather than just shipping more tickets. Over the last 2 quarters, story points completed rose from 320 to 410 per quarter, but Sev-1 incidents also increased from 3 to 7, average cycle time moved from 6.2 days to 5.8 days, and employee attrition rose from 5% to 11%. A recent migration to a new cloud environment and a reorg that combined two squads may have changed both delivery patterns and operational load.
How would you define and measure team improvement over time, and how would you distinguish real improvement from metric noise or local optimization on a single KPI?