Have you witnessed or experienced the effects of Goodhart’s Law in Agile delivery—such as point inflation or metric gaming—in your own teams or organizations? How did it impact trust, planning, or ou

In the pursuit of productivity and predictability, organizations often turn to metrics to track progress and drive improvement. In Agile software delivery, measures like story points and velocity have become ubiquitous tools for estimation and forecasting. Yet, as the British economist Charles Goodhart famously observed, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” This principle—known as Goodhart’s Law—captures a dangerous dynamic: when management fixates on metrics as ends in themselves, teams adapt their behaviour to meet the numbers, often at the expense of genuine progress and transparency. This blog post explores how Goodhart’s Law manifests in Agile delivery, why it leads teams to inflate point sizing, and what organizations can do to foster healthier measurement cultures.

Blog post: ProjectManagement.com - Goodhart's Law in Agile Delivery: When Metrics Become Targets