Agreed. Focusing on outputs leads to busy bodies and doesn't necessarily mean better productivity, just more busyness. "We generated all this output over the past sprint! Nevermind the outcome that had new business value only required a few hours and a days to delivery... But we managed to take 5 times longer to get that to the customer!" I'd rather engineers slow down and think before just producing noise to show they were thinking. I see knowledge work management and business leadership is falling back to vanity again.