Ship Velocity
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Ship velocity is how fast your team gets features from idea to production. It's the only metric that actually matters. Big caveat: it doesn't measure quality, so a team with high ship velocity and no tests is just shipping bugs fast.
Real Talk
Ship velocity measures the rate at which a team delivers features or value to production. It correlates with DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time) but incorporates feature-level granularity. Ship velocity is a leading indicator for engineering health when paired with quality metrics (change failure rate, MTTR); alone, it can be gamed.
When You'll Hear This
"AI tooling doubled our ship velocity." / "Ship velocity without quality metrics is just crashing faster."
Related Terms
Deployment Frequency
Deployment Frequency is how often you ship to production. Elite teams: multiple times per day.
DORA Metrics
DORA Metrics are four numbers that measure how well your team delivers software: how often you deploy, how fast code goes from commit to production, how of...
Lead Time
Lead time is how long it takes from code commit to running in production. Elite teams do it in under an hour. Low performers take over six months. It measu
Ship Factory
A ship factory is a team or codebase optimized for continuous shipping. Deploys happen all day, every day, on autopilot.