GoKawiilIt's Tuesday morning. Your VP of Engineering is standing in front of a slide deck, vibrating with the kind of excitement usually reserved for people who just discovered cryptocurrency in 2017. They've just come back from a conference. Or maybe a vendor dinner. Three glasses of pinot noir and a demo, and now they have news.
"We're rolling out AI coding assistants across every team. Early numbers show a 40% increase in code output. This is going to transform our velocity."
The room does that thing where half the people nod along and the other half develop a sudden interest in their laptops. Your staff engineer is doing that face. You know the face - it's the one where they're calculating whether to say something or just update their LinkedIn later.
Nobody asks the question that matters, which is: velocity toward what, exactly?
Because here's what just happened. Your VP looked at your entire software delivery organisation, identified the one thing that was already pretty fast, and decided to make it faster. They found a station on the assembly line that was not the bottleneck, and threw money at it.
If you know anything about how systems work, you know this doesn't just fail to help. It makes everything actively worse.
Goldratt would like a word
In 1984, Eli Goldratt wrote The Goal, a novel about manufacturing that has no business being as relevant to software as it is. It's also the most useful business book you'll ever read that's technically fiction, which is almost the exact opposite of most KPI frameworks.
The core idea is the Theory of Constraints, and it goes like this:
Every system has exactly one constraint. One bottleneck. The throughput of your entire system is determined by the throughput of that bottleneck. Nothing else matters until you fix the bottleneck.
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