In early 2024, we ran a structured study across 150 teams that had been using Velocity for at least six months. The goal was simple: understand what actually changes when a team stops organizing work around tasks and starts organizing it around outcomes. We measured three things because they were the three things teams complained about most before switching.

Who we tracked.

Every team in the study was between 2 and 18 people and had been operating for less than three years. All of them had used at least one other tool for six months or more before switching to Velocity. The tools varied from Jira, Linear, Asana, and Notion. But the complaints were remarkably consistent across all of them. Too much time in planning. Work finishing late. Blockers sitting unresolved for days at a time.

Planning time dropped by 73%.

We measured planning time as any recurring or ad hoc meeting where the primary activity was deciding what work to do next. This included sprint planning, backlog grooming, estimation sessions, and weekly syncs where the agenda was status and prioritization. Before Velocity, the average across our study group was 5.2 hours per week per team. After six months on Velocity, that average was 1.4 hours. The drop happened quickly. Most teams saw it within the first two weeks, once the habit of letting the AI generate task lists replaced the habit of building them in a meeting.

Goals closed 3.2 times faster.

We compared the average time each team took to complete a defined objective in their previous tool against the time it took to complete a comparable goal in Velocity. The difference was consistent enough that we checked it three times before publishing it. Teams completed goals 3.2 times faster on average. The most significant factor was not speed of individual task execution. It was the reduction in work that had no bearing on the outcome. In task-first tools, teams regularly complete tasks that feel productive but do not move the objective forward. In Velocity, tasks are generated specifically to serve the goal they belong to. Work that does not serve the outcome does not appear on the list.

89% of teams resolved blockers faster.

We defined a blocker as any task that had been flagged or had gone idle for more than 24 hours while the goal it belonged to was still active. In the six months before switching, the average resolution time across our study group was 3.8 days. In the six months after switching, it was 11 hours. The primary reason was visibility. In most tools, a blocked task is only as visible as the person managing it chooses to make it. In Velocity, blocked tasks are surfaced automatically alongside the goal they are slowing down. Teams responded faster not because they cared more, but because they could see the cost of the blocker in real time rather than finding out about it in the next status meeting.

What we took away from this.

None of these results came from teams working more hours. The teams in our study did not change how hard they worked. They changed what they spent their time on. Planning overhead, status coordination, and unresolved blockers are not visible costs in most tools. They accumulate in the background until a deadline slips and nobody can explain exactly why. Removing that overhead does not make a team faster in the way that running harder makes a runner faster. It makes a team faster in the way that removing weight from a runner does. The effort is the same. The output is different.

A note on how we collected this data.

All 150 teams participated voluntarily and consented to having their platform activity used for this study. No team was compensated for participating. We excluded any team that stopped using Velocity within the first 30 days, on the basis that 30 days is not enough time to change a workflow habit and measure the result. The comparisons we drew against previous tools were based on self-reported data collected during onboarding, cross-referenced where possible against publicly available benchmarks for those tools.