What is focus factor?
Focus factor is the percentage of working hours your team actually spends on sprint work. The rest goes to meetings, code review, support, interrupts, planning, and context-switching. Most engineering teams sit between 60-70% in practice — even when they think they're at 90%.
How to find your team's focus factor
Two approaches:
- Forward (estimate): start at 60%. Adjust over a few sprints based on how it goes.
- Backward (back-calculate): take last sprint's completed story points × hours-per-point, divide by raw person-hours. The result is your real focus factor.
Run the math in our Sprint Capacity Calculator.
What eats focus factor
- Stand-ups, planning, retros, demos (5-10%)
- Code review (5-15%)
- Production support / interrupts (5-20%)
- Context switching between tickets (5-10%)
- 1:1s, all-hands, recruiting (varies)
How to raise focus factor
- Batch meetings into specific days; protect maker-time.
- Reduce WIP — fewer concurrent tickets means less context-switching.
- Rotate on-call — pin the support hit on one person per week, not the whole team.
- Async by default — async unblocks people without a meeting.
Common focus factor mistakes
- Optimism — "we'll be 80% next sprint." You won't. Start at 60%.
- Ignoring it — planning at 100% capacity is how teams over-commit by 30-40%.
- Using it as a KPI — focus factor is a planning input, not a performance score.