Held on 17 November 2022
On Time With No Estimates
Planning poker, backlog grooming, high-level design—whatever they call it, your tech team probably has a process for estimating its work, and it's almost certainly mostly wasted time.
When you walk to the pub or drive to the cinema, do you make a detailed flight plan with distances and turns specified to the centimetre? Of course not, because you can look at your surroundings and adjust your journey in real time, and an error of a few seconds here or there makes no material difference. Almost all software (outside nuclear plants and spaceships) admits a similar compromise: give up the unrealistic dream of predicting your team's work months or years in advance, and gain flexibility and instant information flow in return. That's a tradeoff I've seen sales and customer service people eager to make—sadly, it's not uncommon for engineers to be the ones insisting that detailed mapping of the future is the "best practise", despite all evidence to the contrary.
My livestream guest Vasco Duarte wrote the book (literally) on abandoning estimates to make your tech team incredibly productive. He'll join me to discuss:
- How frequent feedback turns errors into successes and why certainty is a chimera.
- How to slice your elephantine projects into carpaccio, with specific examples and the chance to win beer.
- How resetting your "tilted slider" can increase productivity by reducing predictability, and why that may not be popular at first.
