Most organizations obsess over two metrics: Productivity and Capability. But we’ve stripped these words of their meaning.

In the modern corporate machine, these terms have been oversimplified into dangerous caricatures:

• Productivity is reduced to: “Are all your time slots filled?”

• Capability is reduced to: “Do you know more today than you did last year?”

Here is why this logic is failing the people who actually build the systems.

Productivity : The Utilization Myth

If you squeeze your people hard enough, you can achieve 100% time utilization. Everyone is “busy.” Everyone has a full calendar.

But the missing variable is Value.

When management talks about productivity, they assume the tasks assigned are beneficial to the organization. But what if they aren’t? What if most tasks exist solely to appear “busy” or to satisfy a hollow KPI?

When “Speed” becomes the excuse for rushing out “trash work,” you aren’t being productive. You are just creating a high-speed assembly line for features no one uses and systems no one can maintain.

Speed is Not Velocity

We often hear that “the business can’t wait,” so we need more speed of execution.

But Speed is a scalar; it’s just how fast you’re moving. Velocity is a vector; it’s speed with a specific direction. If your organization demands speed without velocity, you aren’t building a product; you’re building a junkyard. You might cross the finish line fast, but you’ll leave behind a mess of technical debt that someone else—usually your most capable engineers—will have to clean up later. Moving fast in the wrong direction provides zero benefit to the organization.

Capability : The Infinite Horizon

“Know more than yesterday.” It sounds noble, but in a dysfunctional system, it becomes a burden. At what point is it enough?

When the organization prioritizes “speed” (trash work) over “velocity” (meaningful direction), the most capable people are punished. They are the ones expected to learn every new tool, fix every legacy disaster, and teach every new hire-only to watch the cycle repeat.

Capability without a meaningful goal isn’t growth. It’s just a faster way to burn out.

The Bottom Line

If you are measuring productivity by how many hours your engineers are “busy,” you’ve already lost the plot. Stop asking for speed. Start defining the velocity.

Otherwise, you’re just paying people to build a pile of junk faster.