Your beloved metrics won’t work.

“My team of 5 is doing 40 story points every two weeks do you understand what this means?!”

Your boss may not know a story point from a gummy bear. Even those of us who play planning poker with our buddies on days off know that one team’s 40 points is another team’s 10. And trust me on this one: showing off your burn-down chart is like showing people pictures of your baby — you’re proud and they’re happy for you, but the truth is nobody is as impressed as you are.

The numbers mean nothing outside of your team. But your improvement does.

Track velocity over time. Be able to report an X% increase in work accomplished.

You are not a team of 5 doing 40 story points per sprint. You’re a team that was doing 20 story points 4 sprints ago, has steadily improved productivity since then, and are now doing 100% more work per sprint than you were 8 weeks ago. 100% improvement in productivity makes sense to anyone.

Even better, speak in terms of money whenever you can. Describe productivity improvement in terms of dollars-per-story-point.

If your team costs $500 a week, that’s $1000 per 2-week sprint. Knowing this, you can say, “Boss, our team measures work in terms of ‘points.’ Eight weeks ago, each point of functionality cost you $50 to create. Today a point only costs you $25. We’ve doubled productivity with Scrum in two months.”

I just wrote that and I already want to give you a raise.