Agile Velocity is arguably the most popular software development metric in the world. It's a very powerful metric when used for individual team sprint capacity planning. And there are two things we know about power... it comes with great responsibility and it corrupts.
When agile velocity is used for anything other than individual team sprint capacity planning, very bad things can occur. In fact, when misused, Agile Velocity is the most dangerous metric for software development organizations. Unfortunately, every day Velocity is abused by executives, engineering leaders, product leaders and even developers.