Throughput

Throughput is the number of work items a team completes in a given period, for example stories finished per week. It is a simple, empirical measure of how much a team actually delivers, used to understand capacity and to forecast.

Because it counts finished items, throughput rewards flow and completion rather than starting lots of work at once. Together with cycle time it is a core flow metric in Kanban, and it can feed probabilistic forecasts of when future work will be done.

Related: flow, cumulative flow diagram, forecast.

Last updated: 4 July 2026 · By Tom, PMP-certified since 2004

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