If you miss a bunch of targets or features you were meant to deliver in the current quarter do you carry them over to the next? And move the items that were originally set for the next quarter further back?
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Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Whatever is most effective to deliver on your product strategy / OKRs etc.
Your backlog is a living toenail, trim it, regularly.
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You are always prioritizing. You look at your backlog, that includes your postponed features as well as your originally planned features for next quarter and prioritize what to deliver next.
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@CarolynMiles, Problem we have is the engineering team take far longer than they estimated to get things done. In addition to that we have a lot of bugs which adds even more time. Sometimes managing a backlog is a mess and I wonder why I’m even trying to plan accordingly because if I try to look ahead I don’t believe my team will be able to deliver
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Are you using something like Scrum and if yes, is there a scrum master? They should be tracking velocity and helping you get more accurate estimates.
This is a pretty serious problem as it erodes trust within the team so you need to work with your leaders to get to a resolution (assuming you are already actively working with your team to mitigate this and it’s not working)
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Scrum yes, scrum master no. It’s the Bain of my life right now. Every 2 weeks there’s a list of things that we’re committed to building in a sprint but doesn’t get done. It’s borderline dysfunctional and I don’t know what to do.
I’m going to have a chat with my senior pm about it and hopefully head of product
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Just make sure you have a good story to tell regarding what you’ve done or tried to do to get this resolved.
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I’m a big believer in the #noestimates movement, and from that perspective the problem isn’t that the team has inaccurate estimates, it’s that estimates can’t be accurate. If you work backwards from there then you arrive at a whole host of org and cultural changes that could change to be more effective.
The other thing is that the team produces a ton of defects. Probably they don’t know how to effectively use testing and continuous delivery to produce high quality results at speed. They also maybe just struggle to get the time to build and learn the systems necessary to do that. In my experience it’s both.
Changes to your application of scrum or whatever else are marginal changes at best. One short term thing to try is stop caring about estimates and start caring about forecasts. Count how many things get done every week and draw a trend line against your backlog. Don’t use story points or whatever for this analysis, just count the number of stories. Exclude defects any other non-story work the team does. See if that helps you predict the future a little bit better.
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Thanks @Michael, That was helpful.
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You set hard dates for things and keep pivoting your priorities and putting the “new and cool stuff” at the top, whilst also complaining that the product is not “finished on time to sell” /s
More seriously. If you can’t plan cadence of engineering accurately, then work on a Now/Next/Later model and try and guide execs away from timeline driven roadmaps. I’m in this situation currently and getting more people to commit to focusing on solving the Needs, rather than shipping the features has also helped.
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You set hard dates for things and keep pivoting your priorities and putting the “new and cool stuff” at the top, whilst also complaining that the product is not “finished on time to sell” /s
More seriously. If you can’t plan cadence of engineering accurately, then work on a Now/Next/Later model and try and guide execs away from timeline driven roadmaps. I’m in this situation currently and getting more people to commit to focusing on solving the Needs, rather than shipping the features has also helped.
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I would think about it is few ways when it comes to features:
- What value is the end user missing out on due the feature(s) not having been completed.
- What are the negative effects due to the delayed feature(s) i. e. loss of customers, negative feedback, loss of revenue
- Is the feature business critical i.e. a vulnerability patch
When it comes to targets what are these specifically :
- No. of new signups
- Adoption rate increase
- Churn rate reduction
Just a few thoughts, additionally what product are looking after or building ?