How One CTO Uses Leading Indicators to Predict Sprint Success

Tech Leadership with Fexingo: Engineering Managers, CTOs, and Technical Leadership Conversations · Jul 6, 2026 · 9m · transcript

Episode 95 of Tech Leadership with Fexingo dives into how a CTO at a mid-size SaaS company uses leading indicators — not lagging ones like velocity — to predict sprint outcomes before they happen. Lucas and Luna unpack the specific dashboard he built: cycle time for open items, work-in-progress count, and scope-change rate. They discuss why measuring 'how many tickets are in flight' beats measuring 'how many tickets we closed last week', and how a single metric — the ratio of accepted to rejected pull requests — flagged a systemic review bottleneck three sprints before it showed up in…