You are an engineering manager for a B2B SaaS platform team responsible for customer-facing reliability and delivery speed. Over the last 2 quarters, your team shipped 18% more story points and closed 22% more tickets, but customer-reported incidents rose from 11 to 17 per month and average cycle time only improved from 9.4 days to 8.9 days. Leadership says the team feels busier, but it is unclear whether the team is actually improving in a way that matters to the business. A recent migration to a new deployment pipeline and increased on-call load may be affecting the trend.
How would you define and measure whether the team is truly improving over time, and how would you diagnose whether the current signals reflect real improvement, metric gaming, or a shift in work mix?