The Myth of Velocity — Out of Owls

One of the barriers to entry for people starting on new roles is the
terminology. Every company I’ve ever worked at has their own set of TLAs
(Three-letter acronyms), and there’s usually a wiki or dictionary that
someone started, at one point,  as a jargon-buster.  

For product development teams, there’s an additional hurdle - we have lots
of words that we use in common, except that everyone seems to have a
different definition of the term. It’s one of the reasons that one of the
standard exercises for team norming is to get together and create a
Definition of Done.

There are a number of other words that trip teams up, though. 

The most dangerous of all, however, is Velocity. Velocity is the holy grail
of any company that isn’t succeeding as fast as they would like (which is
nearly all of them), and is seized upon as the most objective way to
measure the value of teams and people. It’s also misused, wrong, and
(nearly) useless.