Sprint Velocity
A measure of the amount of work a team completes during a single sprint, typically expressed in story points. It serves as a planning tool for forecasting how much work the team can handle in future sprints based on historical performance.
Sprint velocity is a team-specific metric that should never be used to compare teams or as a performance target. Its sole purpose is improving forecast accuracy for sprint planning. By tracking how many story points the team consistently completes, product managers can make more realistic commitments about upcoming work and identify when capacity is being strained.
For AI product teams, velocity tracking has nuances because AI work often involves research spikes and experiments with unpredictable outcomes. A team might allocate story points to a model evaluation task, but the actual effort depends on how many iterations are needed to reach acceptable performance. Growth engineering teams should track velocity separately for deterministic feature work and experimental AI work to improve planning accuracy. When velocity drops unexpectedly, it often signals hidden complexity in data pipelines or model integration that should inform future estimation practices rather than pressure to work faster.
Related Terms
Product-Market Fit
The degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand. Achieving product-market fit means customers are actively seeking, using, and recommending your product because it solves a real and pressing problem for them.
Jobs to Be Done
A framework that defines customer needs as functional, emotional, and social jobs people hire products to accomplish. It shifts focus from demographic segments to the underlying progress customers are trying to make in specific circumstances.
Minimum Viable Product
The simplest version of a product that can be released to test a core hypothesis with real users. An MVP delivers just enough functionality to gather validated learning while minimizing development time and cost.
Minimum Lovable Product
An evolution of the MVP concept that emphasizes delivering enough quality and delight that early users genuinely love the product. It balances speed-to-market with the emotional engagement needed to drive organic word-of-mouth growth.
Design Sprint
A five-day structured process for rapidly prototyping and testing ideas with real users. Developed at Google Ventures, it compresses months of debate into a focused week of mapping, sketching, deciding, prototyping, and testing.
Lean Startup
A methodology for developing businesses and products through validated learning, rapid experimentation, and iterative releases. It emphasizes reducing waste by testing assumptions before building fully-featured solutions.