In first project I worked on, the metric we were told to focus on was the number of stories groomed in refinement, and the number of stories delivered in a sprint. At the time everyone thought it was a great idea.
Story count would incentivize teams to work harder to define, groom and deliver stories each sprint, there by delivering more value to the organization. Management benefited by having a metric to point to saying if we are productive and worth the investment.
However this metric had a huge unintended effect on our team. Instead of delivery valuable stories in manageable chunks, the entire team begin to over-split our stories into more and more smaller chunks until we had so many small stories to fill up our sprint.
The other big issue was our stakeholders were exhausted. The constant interviews and workshops of multiple teams working with the same stakeholders who were each trying to define 30 stories for their own backlogs had made them exhausted.
This is why organizations who are practicing agile should avoid setting arbitrary targets with velocity. The organization should do the hard work and avoid selecting metrics just because its easy to measure. The product owner along with stakeholders need to ask what metric is important for them and why. This will lead to better results.