What is the On-Product Index?

• A. The number of meetings per day
• B. The time spent in sprint planning
• C. The percentage of time teams spend working on product and value
• D. The ratio of defects to features

Answer: (C)

The On-Product Index is a measure of how much of the team’s time is spent on work that directly delivers customer value. It reflects the share of effort allocated to building and improving the product—features, experiments, usability improvements, and other value-adding activities—versus time spent on non-value activities like excessive meetings, internal maintenance that doesn’t move the product forward, or firefighting tasks that don’t contribute to delivering value. It’s expressed as a percentage of total available time.

For example, if a sprint has 80 hours of total team capacity and 60 hours are spent on feature development and user-value work, the On-Product Index would be 75%. A higher index indicates more focus on producing value for customers, while a lower index signals more time spent outside direct product value, suggesting a need to reduce non-value work.

This concept helps the Product Owner and team assess alignment with value delivery, guide prioritization, and identify opportunities to streamline processes so more time goes toward building the product. The other options don’t capture the metric’s essence: the number of meetings per day, time spent in sprint planning, or the ratio of defects to features do not reflect how the team’s time is distributed toward generating customer value.