When You Push for 3x

I was at a lunch table with my boss and most of my team, telling the story of how we'd doubled our velocity. I was proud of the number. I told it like it was a win. My team was sitting right there, listening to me describe what they'd done to make that number. They knew. I didn't yet. That's the part I don't tell in the short version. Not just that velocity got gamed, but that I was the one carrying the number into rooms and setting it on the table like a trophy. Every time I did that, I taught my team something about what I was rewarding. Death by a thousand paper cuts Velocity doesn't collapse in one visible moment. There's no incident report. No postmortem. It erodes the way a codebase quietly deteriorates when nobody's watching the right signals. Tickets start getting larger. Not more complex ... larger. A thing that should be a 2 becomes a 5. A 5 becomes an 8. The complexity hasn't changed. The estimate has. Engineers aren't doing this because they're lazy or dishonest. They're do