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Evidence-Based Management (EBM): Turning Data into Strategic Agility

Measure what matters, inform strategic decisions, and continuously improve outcomes by focusing on value, responsiveness, innovation, and untapped opportunities.

Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a strategy for improving an organisation’s ability to deliver value by making decisions based on evidence, not opinion. It enables data-informed investment in agility, innovation, and outcomes rather than output.

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Overview

Too many organisations talk about being agile, but they’re still flying blind. Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a strategy to fix that. It’s not a framework, a methodology, or a tool. It’s a way to stop pretending we’re improving and start proving it.

EBM gives us a structure for inspecting how well we’re delivering value and where to invest next. It’s built around four key areas:

  1. Current Value – Are we delivering value now, or are we just burning cash? Customer satisfaction, revenue per employee, and product usage give us the truth.
  2. Time to Market – How fast can we learn, deliver, and respond to change? Cycle time, release frequency, and time spent stabilising releases tell us whether we’re built for speed or for bureaucracy.
  3. Ability to Innovate – Can we create new value, or are we buried under technical debt and bloated backlogs? Look at innovation rate, feature usage, and how much of the product is actually used.
  4. Unrealised Value – What’s the opportunity cost of staying the same? If we had fewer constraints, where could we win?

These aren’t vanity metrics. They’re signals that help leaders make real decisions about where to focus, where to invest, and what to stop doing. You don’t need a prescription. You need clarity, direction, and feedback.

EBM enables an empirical approach to strategic improvement. It’s not about tracking everything. It’s about measuring the right things, at the right time, to drive better outcomes. If you’re not using data to improve how you deliver value, then you’re not doing agility. You’re doing theatre.

If you want to move beyond output metrics and start managing for outcomes, EBM gives you the scaffolding to do that—without pretending there’s a silver bullet. It’s messy. It’s iterative. But it works.

Learn More about Evidence Based Management

Guides

The Evidence-Based Management Guide: Improving Value Delivery under Conditions of Uncertainty

Discover more about “The Evidence-Based Management Guide and how it can help you in your Agile journey!
Tags

Current Value

Current Value is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management. Rather than being a single measure, it comprises a group of indicators that collectively assess the tangible, real‑time value a product or service delivers. This group of measures includes, for example, customer satisfaction data, revenue impact, and performance feedback—all of which help determine how much value is being realized at present.
Tags

Unrealised Value

Unrealized Value is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management and represents a group of measures focused on the potential value that could be captured with further improvements. Instead of being a single metric, it includes various indicators that assess untapped opportunities, such as latent market demand or areas for innovation. These combined measures offer insight into how much additional value remains available for the organization.
Blog

Stop Hiding Behind Complexity and Start Delivering Continuously

Continuous delivery is achievable for any software, regardless of complexity. Success depends on investment in automation, quality, and process improvement—not technical barriers.
Videos

Evidence-Based Management: The Four Key Value Areas in Scrum

Explains Scrum’s four key value areas—current value, unrealised value, ability to innovate, and time to market—for data-driven product and organisational improvement.
Blog

Metrics that matter with evidence-based management

Explains how evidence-based management uses reliable metrics and KPIs at team and organisational levels to drive better decisions, value delivery, and process improvement.
Videos

Mastering Evidence-Based Management for Agile Success

Learn how Evidence-Based Management uses data to guide Agile teams, improve decision-making, track value, and boost innovation, customer satisfaction, and time to market.
Blog

Evidence-based Management: Gathering the metrics

Explains how to gather key metrics for evidence-based management in software organisations, focusing on value delivery, time to market, and ability to innovate.
Guides

The Evidence-Based Management Guide Improving Value Delivery under Conditions of Uncertainty

Discover more about The Evidence-Based Management Guide
Tags

Time to Market

Time to Market is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management that focuses on organizational capability. It is not a single measure but a group of metrics that evaluate the speed at which ideas are transformed into deliverable products or features. This collection of measures may include lead time, cycle time, and overall development duration—providing a comprehensive view of how quickly value reaches the customer.
Blog

What my father taught me about Evidence-based Management (34 years before it was invented!)

Explores how evidence-based management uses data-driven practices to improve organisational agility, value delivery, and decision-making in both business and software contexts.
Videos

Mastering Evidence-Based Management in Agile: Inform, Don’t Control

Explains how to use data in Agile management to guide decisions and behaviours, focusing on informed outcomes without letting metrics control teams or stifle value delivery.
Videos

The Importance of Evidence-Based Management in Agile Environments

Explains how evidence-based management helps Agile teams use data and key metrics to measure progress, make informed decisions, and drive continuous improvement.
Videos

Evidence-Based Management: The Key to Agile Success

Evidence-based management uses data-driven decisions to help organisations achieve business outcomes, adapt to market changes, and maximise value beyond agile processes.
Videos

Mastering Evidence-Based Management (EBM) for Product Owners: Maximizing Value Delivery

Learn how product owners use Evidence-Based Management (EBM) to make data-driven decisions, track key value metrics, and maximise product value and team engagement.
Videos

Unlocking Business Value: The Power of Evidence-Based Management for Effective Leadership

Explains how evidence-based management uses data-driven decisions and tailored metrics to boost business value, leadership effectiveness, and organisational innovation.
Videos

How Do You Know the Value Currently Delivered in Your Organization?

Learn how Evidence-Based Management helps organisations measure delivered value using key metrics like customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and product usage data.
Signals

Building the wrong thing is worse than fixing a bug

Most features don’t deliver value. Short feedback loops and real user input help teams avoid wasted effort by ensuring they build what users actually need.
Videos

How to Measure Your Organization's Ability to Improve Value Through Innovation

Learn how to assess and improve your organisation’s innovation capability using evidence-based management and key metrics like technical debt, innovation rate, and complexity.
Videos

The Power of Metrics: Why PAL-EBM is Essential for Your Organization

Learn how evidence-based metrics drive organisational success, avoid negative behaviours, and enable transparent, data-driven decisions for leaders and teams at all levels.
Videos

How Do You Know How Long It Takes to Deliver Value?

Explains how Agile teams can measure and improve Time to Market using key metrics like lead time, cycle time, and time to fix to deliver value to customers faster.
Videos

The Importance of Validation in Product Development: A Strategic Approach

Explains why validating product features is essential, highlighting hypothesis-driven development, data collection, and evidence-based decisions to maximise long-term product value.
Videos

Transform Your Leadership: The Power of Evidence-Based Management in Agile

Discover how evidence-based management empowers Agile leaders to make data-driven decisions, foster continuous improvement, and boost team performance and collaboration.
Blog

Product Goal is an Intermediate Strategic Goal

Explains how product goals serve as intermediate strategic goals, guiding agile organisations through uncertainty using experimentation, outcomes, and data-driven discovery.
Videos

Mastering Outcomes: How Evidence-Based Management Transforms Your Project Success

Learn how evidence-based management uses clear outcomes and targeted metrics to improve project success, enabling informed decisions and continuous improvement.
Videos

Understanding the Difference: Traditional Management vs. Evidence-Based Management

Explains how traditional management relies on authority and intuition, while evidence-based management uses data, analysis, and meaningful metrics for better decisions.
Videos

Harnessing Evidence-Based Management: Transform Your Decision-Making with Data-Driven Insights

Learn how evidence-based management uses data and purposeful metrics to inform decisions, shape behaviours, and drive continuous improvement in organisations.
Videos

How to Discover Unrealized Value in Your Product

Learn how to identify and measure unrealised value in your product using Evidence-Based Management, key metrics, and actionable steps to improve customer satisfaction and growth.
Tags

Lead Time

Measuring the time from work initiation to customer delivery, helping teams monitor workflow efficiency and improve value delivery.
Tags

Ability to Innovate

Ability to Innovate is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management that gauges organizational capability in terms of innovation. It is composed of a group of measures that assess how effectively an organization generates, implements, and sustains innovative solutions. Rather than a single metric, this group may include indicators like the frequency of experiments, innovation throughput, and learning cycles, offering a broad view of the organization’s capacity to innovate.
Blog

How to Build for Business Resilience and Continuity

Learn key strategies for building business resilience and continuity, including observability, system decoupling, routine deployments, team empowerment, and rapid recovery.
Blog

There is no place like production

Validating product value requires releasing features to real users in production, gathering feedback, and measuring usage, satisfaction, and business impact for improvement.
Videos

Say-Do Metrics: Avoiding Agile Banditry in Your Organization

Explains the risks of using say-do metrics in Agile, highlighting how they encourage vanity metrics, harm psychological safety, and shift focus from outcomes to outputs.
Videos

Unlocking Unrealised Value: The Key to Elevating Your Product Development Strategy

Explains how identifying and validating unrealised value, understanding user needs, and rapid feedback loops can enhance product development and maximise user impact.
Videos

The Strategic Imperative: Empowering Teams with Vision, Goals, and Direction

Explores how clear vision, goals, and evidence-based management empower teams, improve alignment, and foster autonomy, engagement, and effective decision-making in organisations.
Blog

Announcing Professional Agile Leadership with Evidence-Based Management Training (PAL-EBM) from Scrum.org

Learn about Scrum.org’s new PAL-EBM training, which helps leaders use evidence-based management and custom metrics to align teams with organisational vision and goals.

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