Scrum says the Product Owner is accountable for maximising value and does not say how to measure it. That silence is deliberate, because the measures depend on the product. Evidence-Based Management is Scrum.org's answer to the gap, and it is separate material rather than part of the Scrum Guide.
Its central move is to stop asking one question about value and start asking four. Two of them look at the product and two look at the organisation building it, which is the arrangement that makes the framework useful.
The top row describes the product, the bottom row describes the organisation. The left column is the present, the right column is the potential.
Current Value
Current Value is what the product delivers right now, to customers and to the organisation. Revenue per employee, product cost ratio, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and the share of the product people actually use all sit here.
It answers one question only, which is whether the product is delivering value today. It is silent on whether that will continue, and a product can post excellent Current Value for years while the ability to keep producing it drains away underneath. That is why it is never read alone.
Unrealised Value
Unrealised Value is what could be delivered if every potential need of every potential customer were met. It is the satisfaction gap between the outcome somebody wants and the experience they have today, expressed as the size of the opportunity still on the table.
It is the area teams most often skip, because it is the only one that cannot be read out of a system that already exists. Nothing in your analytics contains it. It has to be found by talking to people who are not yet satisfied, including people who are not yet customers.
The reading is comparative. High Current Value with low Unrealised Value describes a product close to done, where the sensible move may be to invest elsewhere. High Unrealised Value says there is somewhere worth going, and says nothing about whether you can get there.
Ability to Innovate
Ability to Innovate is how effectively the organisation can deliver something new. The proportion of engineering effort that reaches the product rather than overhead, the weight of technical debt, the count of production incidents and the number of old versions still being supported all push it down.
It answers whether the organisation could act on an opportunity if it found one. An organisation with a full Product Backlog and falling Ability to Innovate is one whose plan is worth less every Sprint, because the capacity to execute it is being consumed by keeping the past alive.
Time-to-Market
Time-to-Market is how quickly the organisation can deliver, and then learn from what it delivered. Release frequency, cycle time, lead time, the length of a stabilisation period, mean time to repair and the time it takes to get a usable signal from a release all belong here.
It is the area that decides whether any of the others can be acted on, because an organisation that cannot release cannot run an experiment. Everything empirical depends on the loop closing, and this measures how fast it turns.
Measures at a glance
| Key Value Area | Answers | Example measures |
|---|---|---|
| Current Value | Is the product delivering value now | Revenue per employee, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, product usage index |
| Unrealised Value | How much opportunity remains | Market share, customer satisfaction gap, desired versus current experience |
| Ability to Innovate | Could we act on an opportunity | On product index, technical debt, production incidents, installed version index |
| Time-to-Market | How fast do we deliver and learn | Release frequency, cycle time, lead time, stabilisation period, mean time to repair |
Why two of them are not about value at all
Current Value and Unrealised Value describe the product. Ability to Innovate and Time-to-Market describe the organisation building it.
That split is the point. An organisation can know exactly where the opportunity lies and be unable to reach it, because every release takes a quarter and most engineering effort goes on keeping old versions alive. Measuring only value hides that, and the resulting plan fails for reasons the measures never showed.
Reading the four together produces a diagnosis rather than a score. Strong Current Value with weak Ability to Innovate is a product living on past work. Large Unrealised Value with slow Time-to-Market is an opportunity somebody faster will take.
Goals turn strategy into experiments
Evidence-Based Management structures intent at three distances.
The Strategic Goal is the outcome the organisation is working towards, usually far enough away that the path to it is unknown. It is stated in terms of what changes for the people who receive the product.
The Intermediate Goal is a nearer objective that would demonstrate progress towards the strategic one, close enough to be assessed within months.
The Immediate Tactical Goal is the next step, small enough that a Scrum Team can pursue it now. The Product Goal in Scrum sits at this distance.
Each step is treated as a hypothesis. Form it, run it, measure what actually happened, and adapt the next step from the result. The structure exists so that a distant ambition produces a decision this Sprint, and so that the decision can be shown to be wrong.
What the measures are not
They are not targets. A measure adopted as a target is optimised directly, which usually destroys the thing it was standing in for. Release frequency chased for its own sake produces frequent releases of nothing.
They are not a fixed list either. Evidence-Based Management names the four areas and offers example measures, and the measures that fit a product are for the people building it to choose. What the framework asks is that the choice be made, published and used to decide something.