Graham McNicoll

I spoke to an engineering manager last week whose team still tracks sprint progress in story points. In an AI-assisted world, story points matter less than ever. They were never that useful to begin with. They are a proxy metric standing in for what the team actually cares about: value delivered. Goodhart's Law says the moment a proxy is used in place of the real thing, it opens itself up to being gamed. A good example for this is when colonial Hanoi had a rat problem. The French administration offered a bounty for every rat tail turned in. Residents started cutting tails off live rats, collecting the bounty, and releasing them. Some bred rats to harvest more tails. The bounty made the problem worse. Story points are your team's rat tails. When velocity dips, the points get bigger. The number goes up. Actual progress does not. What proxy metric is your team optimizing that everyone quietly knows is being gamed?