2 posts tagged with "planning"

A team of 6 engineers, 60 working days, 8 hours each. The PM walks into the planning room with 2,880 dev-hours of capacity on the slide. Q3 roadmap fits in 2,400. Comfortable buffer. Three months later 40% of the roadmap is late and the postmortem blames "scope creep."

There was no scope creep. The capacity number was wrong on day one. Stanford economist John Pencavel's hours-and-productivity study shows output per hour starts collapsing past 49 hours per week, long before you hit 60. Microsoft Research and UC Irvine's Gloria Mark added the second blade: every interruption costs an average 23 minutes 15 seconds to fully recover focus. Stack those two findings on top of any 8-hour calendar and you get something far less than 8 productive hours of real output.

McKinsey research on engineering effectiveness found that the highest-performing organizations share one trait: their engineering goals are explicitly connected to business outcomes. Yet most engineering teams write OKRs like "Improve code quality" with a key result of "Increase test coverage to 80%." That's not an OKR. That's a task with a number next to it. Good engineering OKRs connect technical work to business outcomes, and the right metrics make them actually measurable.