Why Your 5-Day Features Now Take 3 Weeks (And It’s Getting Worse)

Your board meeting is tomorrow. The feature promised for Q1 just slipped to Q3. Your lead engineer quit, citing “impossible technical debt.” Your CPO is asking why a simple integration takes three sprints.

Sound familiar?

You’re not alone. After analyzing over 200 organizations, I’ve discovered a mathematical pattern that explains why every sprint takes longer than the last. Not because your teams are getting worse — but because friction compounds invisibly at 25–80% annually, and nobody’s measuring it.

Here’s the killer: that five-day feature that now takes three weeks? By next year, it’ll take five weeks. By year three, it’ll take two months. Same feature. Same complexity. Exponentially worse delivery.

The Simple Equation That Predicts Your Team’s Future

Story points are theater metrics. Here’s what actually determines your delivery speed:

Actual Delivery Time = Value Time + Friction Time

Value Time is real engineering work: designing solutions, writing code, creating tests, documenting decisions. The work that moves your product forward.

Friction Time is everything else: decoding vague requirements, searching for non-existent documentation, waiting for approvals, rework from mid-sprint changes, coordination meetings because teams can’t work independently.