This is an interesting and common point of view, but you can have predictability at least in some areas, and that’s a good thing. Average cycle time for example, is a good predictor of how long it will take to implement an average story (assuming that the team applies techniques for things like story narrowing to all stories consistently). It tells you nothing about the value of those stories though--whether those stories are worth implementing. For example using cycle time to predict a delivery date for a long backlog is futile waterfall thinking because most of the things in that backlog won’t be worth building. Average cycle time is a valuable number for the team to know, even when that number does not escape to management, however. Usually, when I bring up lean metrics of this sort, people scream about feature factories, but the rate at which you can implement stories on average is not particularly related to feature-factory thinking, or at least doesn’t have to be. It’s a number that a team can use internally in order to get better. Nothing wrong with improvement.

Source: x.com/allenholub/status/1820147364562342195