Anakin Padme meme:
Anakin: I will use agile to plan my project
Padme: 2-3 sprints ahead right?
Anakin:
Padme: 2-3 sprints ahead right?
“No deviations will be approved from this year’s Agile product roadmap!”
What what? I thought agile means you don’t have to plan!
Nah. It doesn’t say not to plan. It says to prefer responding to change over planning. Which means both happen but responding to change is more crucial. Or put another way don’t let your plan get in the way of responding to change.
I’m sure you were being sarcastic, but I get kind of tired of the Agile strawman and people shitting on it. It’s not a complex philosophy yet people extrapolate so much (too much) and then get annoyed when their assumptions don’t pan out well. even performing sprints is an extrapolation, so this meme gets it wrong too.
Every dev loves agile until they have to have a conversation with the users.
Bias on show : trad PM from the past .
Tru dat. Agile product management is not the same as agile project management. Agile Project Management is about the ability to figure and changes things along the lines of the predetermined cost and time path (e.g. figuring out features required along the way), not about the agility to prolong/shorten product value proposition time to market.
Do your scrum-using organization put users at the development process?!? I don’t think I’ve seen any Agile¹ organization doing that.
1 - The one with capital “A”, that is an antonym of the one with lower cap “a”.
The challenge is, in a real org of some size, you’ll suddenly get marketing or customer success asking you for commitments that are very far out, because ad slots have to be booked or a very large customer renewal is coming up.
And some of the normal coping mechanism (beta-branch that spins off stable feature to the general release branch) don’t work for all those requests.
Try as you might, you are going to get far off deadlines that you have to work towards. Not for everything but for more than you’d like.
The stupidly easy solution is to just give them stuff that has already been successfully delivered to production to market, 9 months from now. There’s invariably a huge backlog of years worth of successes that marketing wasn’t even aware of.
Feature flags baby. This is how we do it.
Make it live but disabled, have an env prior to prod with them on, for any regressions.
Launching your already comprehensively tested and actually live feature? An easy deployment.
Can someone please tell me how to do this for the BE. Ta.
Yeah, I agree that might work if the marketing team isn’t that connected to the product. I’ve not worked with a marketing team where that would work, but maybe it will for some. It doesn’t change the “massive customer will only renew if” scenario, though.
I’ve not worked with a marketing team where that would work, but maybe it will for some.
I’ve never been anywhere that I thought it would work, but it ultimately did, almost everywhere.
I’ve found it takes a few iterations, but the marketing folks in on it love being the ones who actually can reliably deliver on their promises.
It doesn’t work for the marketers that promise whatever they please without talking to dev, but I don’t find them to be worthwhile professional allies, so I don’t sweat it.
It doesn’t change the “massive customer will only renew if” scenario, though.
Very true. It doesn’t help with that case, and that one does happen. I’ve had the best luck saying “we don’t do that, but we’re scrambling to add it” in that situation.
We work in sprints but plan on roadmaps based on quarters one year into the future. So basically we just combine the worst of both worlds.
“Oh we have bugs from feature XY from last sprint? Never mind we need to follow the roadmap, we can fix it next quarter”
Fuck, I hate it so much
Who the hell came up with that? 😂 I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious.
Not sure about GP, but that’s basically what we did under “SAFe” (Scaled Agile Framework). PI planning means taking most of a sprint to plan everything for the next quarter or so. It’s like a whole week of ticket refinement meetings. Or perhaps 3 days, but when you’ve had 3 days of ticket refinement meetings, it might as well be the whole work week for as much a stuff as you’re going to get done otherwise.
It’s as horrible as you’re thinking, and after a lot of agitating, we stopped doing that shit.
