Episode 1 — Live
Valuestream.
Where value actually flows.
A podcast from Rick Pollick on how modern companies turn strategy into shipped software — the operating systems, delivery practices, and agentic-AI patterns moving value from the roadmap to production. New episodes Monthly.
Episode 1Episode 2 · 20 min
Trust the Number That Hurts
The Metrics That Lie in the Agentic Era, and What to Measure Instead
June 12, 2026
Two leaders, two trusted numbers, two metrics that looked great and lied. DORA on the engineering side. Critical path on the program side. Both were built for a world where the work was always authored by humans. This episode walks the five-metric replacement layer for engineering and the dependency-density score for programs, plus a real case at 200 deploys/week where the dashboard was elite and the program was broken.
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Episode 2
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The format
Three segments. One coherent show.
Every episode follows the same spine — so guests, teardowns, and solo pieces all feel like one show, and you always know what's next.
Segment
Intake
The problem or opportunity entering the stream — framing, signal, strategic intent.
Segment
Flow
How the work actually moves — operating model, platform, delivery practice, the agentic layer.
Segment
Outcome
What changed — shipped software, org behaviour, customer metrics, what we'd do differently.
Episode 2 — segment by segment
- Intake. Why DORA and critical path are both failing the same way: the assumption that humans are doing the work has changed, and the math hasn't.
- Flow. The five-metric engineering layer (outcome latency, reviewer load, rework ratio, time to restore, production confidence) plus dependency density for programs (code, data, process, people edges per node).
- Outcome. 200 deploys/week and reporting elite, but the agent-authored failure rate was 3x. Rework ratio 26%, payments cluster density 3.4. We collapsed services, decoupled, cut high-edge scope. Density 1.9. Rework 9%. Shipped on a date we could predict.
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