All Work, No Win? Rethink What Your Team Really Delivers

We all want to believe our teams are making progress. The tickets are closing, the commits are flying, and new features keep shipping. But here’s the catch: is all that activity actually delivering value or just keeping us busy?

The Effort Trap

The effectiveness of a project comes down to how much value it delivers compared to the resources it consumes.

Most teams have no trouble tracking what they’ve invested. But when it comes to measuring value, many fall back on easy-to-count proxies:

• Number of tickets closed

• Lines of code committed

• New releases or version updates

The problem? These metrics don’t always translate into satisfied customers or real business gains. So let’s take a closer look at why that disconnect happens.

What Business Measures Becomes the Focus

According to the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) Guide from Scrum.org, most organizations track performance in five categories:

EBM Category	Definition	Examples
Input	Raw resources	Time, money, people
Activity	Work being done	Development, testing, meetings
Output	Deliverables	Releases, features, reports
Outcome	Value for stakeholders	Solving real problems
Impact	Ultimate business results	Revenue, market share, growth

Here’s where things go sideways: teams often mistake outputs for outcomes, especially when value wasn’t part of the planning conversation to begin with. That’s why it’s possible to ship sprint after sprint and still fail to deliver what truly matters to customers and the business.

Shifting from Output to Outcomes with EBM

Noticing this disconnect, Ken Schwaber, co-creator of the Scrum framework, introduced Evidence-Based Management (EBM) to help teams and organizations move beyond raw effort and focus on measurable outcomes.

With EBM:

• Managers can steer the business using real data.

• Teams gain a clear set of metrics to track and grow the value they deliver.

But making this shift takes more than adding new metrics. It calls for a change in how teams think, plan, and define success.

Coming Up Next

In the next post, we’ll explore the four core EBM metrics that help teams stop counting effort and start improving value.

Until then, here’s something to consider: Are you measuring what truly matters or just what’s easier to track?