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Why the weird name?
We’re sailors. And agilists. The overlap in the Venn diagram of those two populations isn’t huge, so hopefully this explanation will help:
Velocity in the agile world: Scrum teams often use the term velocity to define their speed or capacity. It’s useful to help forecast what they can do for their customers.
Velocity Made Good in the sailing world: Sailors love taking them wherever the wind blows them...until they want to go upwind. That’s a little harder in a sailboat. No sailboat can sail straight into the wind, the closer they head to directly upwind, the slower they go. You could measure your speed (velocity) but that doesn’t tell the whole story. VMG is your speed towards your destination (so you might be sailing 6 knots, but only make 4 knots to your destination). VMG helps sailors optimize their speed and direction. This is immensely more useful in racing than cruising, where the primary measure of success is number of rum drinks downed.
Velocity Made Good in our world: We loved the overlapping terms, but that’s not all. Speed is important for teams, but only if you’re headed in the right direction. We’re more focused on outcomes instead of outputs. Velocity for a scrum team doesn’t mean much to their customers. Their customers care about metrics like % automated processes or low defect rates. We help teams focus not only on increasing their speed, but heading in the right direction.
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