You manage an engineering team building internal tools for a B2B SaaS product, and leadership is worried that output has become bursty rather than sustainable. Over the last 6 months, the team averaged 38 story points completed per sprint, but the range widened from 22 to 61, on-time sprint commitment fell from 84% to 68%, and Sev-2+ production incidents rose from 3 to 7 per month after two major releases. Team size stayed flat at 9 engineers, while average cycle time increased from 4.2 to 6.1 days and 90-day engineer retention slipped from 96% to 90%.
How would you define the right metric framework to determine whether the team is set up to deliver consistently over time rather than in short bursts, and how would you diagnose what is driving the recent volatility?
