[mful]

> Do I want my team to value the number of tickets closed, or do I want them to value our critical business KPIs?

How does this look in practice, in large organizations? Is everyone empowered to freelance on whatever they think will improve said KPIs?

At some point, someone needs to have the power to decide what is being built (hopefully with an eye towards KPI-impact), and others need to fall in line and close some tickets.

[foobarian]

Well, presumably the tickets you have are there to build KPI-improving features. The people who open the tickets open them for that purpose! At our company even people who "freelance" stuff still open tickets for that work, because it's useful to document stuff and help others learn.