> Not fond of these metrics. Feels easy to gamify and hack. I can just push commit a when it's more mature, good I improved the metric, but reduced tinkering, collaboration with devs and product and probably released a subpar solution.
This is not gamed/hacked -- it's the metric working as designed. It is meant to measure purely how fast you can get commits into production. If you have found a way to do that faster, then the metric should increase to reflect that.
So there are two aspects of the problem: are you delivering fast, and are you delivering something valuable?
The delivery lead time doesn't even pretend to measure whether you're delivering something valuable. You need a different metric for that. And in your example, that would go down by your practise.
While I sort of see the point of such metrics, in my experience they are nothing but data porn to show improvements to higher up management, which in time lead to yet more complex and beaurocratic organizations.