Zylos builds analytics infrastructure for growth and product teams. Their platform pulls behavioral data from across a product stack, normalizes it, and surfaces it in a format that non-technical teams can actually act on. The pitch is simple: your data should tell you what to do next, not just what happened.

Running a data company means the internal bar for decision-making is high. Everything at Zylos is measured. Which made it harder to ignore when their own planning process had no clear connection to outcomes.

Measuring everything except what mattered.

Zylos tracked their work the way you would expect a data company to. Detailed task lists, velocity metrics, burndown charts. They had more visibility into their sprint health than most teams twice their size. What they did not have was a clear answer to a simpler question: are we actually moving toward the goal?

"We had every metric you could want on our sprints. Completion rate, velocity, cycle time. None of them told us whether we were shipping what actually mattered."

Sara Vance, Head of Product

The data was precise. The direction was not. Tasks were completing on schedule while the outcomes those tasks were supposed to produce kept slipping into the next cycle.

Outcome-first planning for a data-first team.

The shift to Velocy was straightforward for a team that already thought in outcomes. The product they built was designed to connect behavior to business impact. Applying that same logic to their own planning felt obvious once they tried it.

Each cycle started with a defined goal. Tasks were generated to serve that goal directly. Work that could not be traced back to the outcome did not make the list. For a team that had been drowning in well-intentioned but unfocused effort, the filter was immediate.

"We cut our planning time from about two hours a week to twenty minutes. The other hour and forty minutes were just decisions we should have made at the goal level."

Sara Vance, Head of Product

Data cycles closed faster.

Zylos measured the time it took to take a defined product or growth goal from open to shipped. Before Velocy, the average across their active goals was nine weeks. Six months after switching, it was under three.

The primary driver was not faster execution. It was less work that had no bearing on the outcome. Zylos had been completing tasks that looked relevant but were not directly connected to what they were trying to ship. Removing that work did not change how fast the team moved. It changed what the movement was pointed at.

"Nine weeks to three was not because we started working faster. It was because we stopped working sideways."

Sara Vance, Head of Product

Blockers became data points, not surprises.

A data company has a particular sensitivity to information that arrives too late to act on. Zylos built their product around the idea that real-time signals are only valuable if they reach the right person at the right moment. Their old planning tool treated blockers the opposite way.

A blocked task sat quietly until someone asked about it. By the time it surfaced in a standup or a weekly review, the cost had already accumulated. In Velocy, blocked tasks appeared in context next to the goal they were holding up. The team saw the cost of the delay in real time.

"We build tools so our clients never find out about a problem after it has already hurt them. Velocy applied that same logic to how we track our own work."

Sara Vance, Head of Product

What changed.

Zylos did not change how they measured their work. They changed what the work was organized around. Outcomes first, tasks second, blockers visible the moment they happened. The metrics they had been tracking started reflecting real progress rather than activity.

For a team whose entire product is built on making data actionable, having a planning tool that operated on the same principle was less of a switch and more of a correction.

"We tell clients that data without direction is just noise. We were living that problem ourselves. Velocy fixed it."

Sara Vance, Head of Product