How Good Products Slide into Oblivion

You’re shipping more than ever. But no one’s happy.

It’s the day before the sprint ends. Your team is scrambling to finish the last few Jira tickets. After hovering around 40% completion mid-sprint, they’ve pulled off a 90% burndown. It's an exhilarating feeling and the team sighs a bit after squeaking by after a few late nights. The team is even recognized for it's consistent sprint metrics performance.

It might feel like this team is winning but something isn't right. Last sprint there were more bug tickets than feature work. User feedback suggests the product isn’t what it used to be. There are whispers of churn risk across the portfolio and priorities are shifting every sprint. Despite momentary wins the team feels drained and burned out. What's going on?

The Velocity Trap

The velocity trap, as described in this article, is a common but often ignored pattern. It happens when teams focus on sprint completion without tying their work to meaningful outcomes.

At Contralto, we see this all the time. Tools like Jira make it easy to fall into this habit. It tracks velocity, not value, so teams begin to optimize for what moves the burndown chart instead of what improves the product. Engineers start measuring themselves by how many tickets they complete. Features get split into dozens of tasks so that velocity steadily burns down and the big picture fades.

Bug fixes are usually reactive or surface level when the focus is on getting the ticket done. The root issue might be obvious, but solving it would take coordination or zooming out. Instead, the team patches over it. Sometimes the patch creates a new issue. Still, the sprint closes strong.

This is how teams end up solving problems they created the sprint before. It looks like progress. But it’s just a miserable loop.

The Contralto Board

Contralto's mission is to help teams break out of that loop. The Contralto Board is our tool for reconnecting day-to-day work with real outcomes.

It shows the jobs your software is supposed to do, how well each job is done, and whether that job still matters. It takes discipline to set up. But once it’s in place, teams start working with clarity again.

Here’s what it tracks:

1. Problem — A real customer problem, validated through interviews or feedback.
2. Relevancy — A score to gauge whether that problem is still worth solving. If not, the feature tied to it gets revisited or removed.
3. Solution — The feature built to solve the problem.
4. Outcome — What success should look like once the solution is live.
5. Effectiveness — The metric that shows if the outcome is being achieved.

The Contralto Board acts as both spec and roadmap. It helps teams stay honest about what they’re doing and why. It makes space to rethink features that have outlived their purpose. It's also a place to capture new problems.

Looking Forward

Most product tools are built for planning and shipping. Few help teams figure out whether the work made a difference. We’re closing that gap first with our method, then with our software.

Most companies ship features that look like progress but change nothing. We believe in a different path. We aim to reteach companies to build with intention, measure what matters and create products that last. When teams focus on meaningful outcomes, work becomes calm and purposeful. And we restore faith in what software can be when built with intention.