Artifact: Memo — Why Velocity-Linked Bonuses Backfire

Comet team -- velocity-as-target memo -- exercises co-14, co-05.

Story points are relative-size estimates a team produces about its own future work -- they are not an externally measured unit like lines of code or a stopwatch. The instant a team's average velocity affects its own bonus, the team gains a direct, rational incentive to inflate its estimates: the same story that used to be called a 5 gets called an 8, with zero change to the actual work. This is Goodhart's Law in its purest form -- the measure becomes the target, and stops being a good measure the moment it does.

The damage is not limited to unfairness between teams. It also destroys the number's original, legitimate use: once a team's own historical velocity is inflated, that team's own future sprint forecasts become meaningless too, because they are built on an average that no longer means what it used to.

Proposed alternative: reward outcome metrics the team does not control the raw units of -- cycle-time trend (computed independently of any self-report; a team cannot "estimate" its way to a shorter cycle time) and defect-escape rate. Neither can be inflated by a team simply agreeing to call things bigger.