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> just go talk to the stakeholders - product/sales team - ask them if the delay could be potentially customer losing In my experience, sales team rarely have a

> just go talk to the stakeholders - product/sales team - ask them if the delay could be potentially customer losing In my experience, sales team rarely have any incentive to help out here. They almost always say that delay will create problems and they quantify in terms of dollars e.g. If X is not done by this date we will lose Y dollars. That Y number is almost made up to make things more urgent. Actually, I have seen sales blaming lack of sales numbers on engineering because the delivery was "too" late.

pm90 7y ago
Agile works well when you’re working in a win win kinda relationship. What you describe happens more often than I am willing to admit. What helps here is if you hold Business Value meetings with real people involved and try to reason relative priorities of stories. This is the fuzzy, social aspect of Agile development but I suspect it’s really the core idea behind the whole thing: it forces people to talk in person and empathize more, hopefully building up cooperative relationships rather than extractive ones. If the stakeholders continue to be sociopaths though, you can either chose to give in and do whatever they say or lie. Both options break the spirit of the thing. Frequently there’s a 3rd invisible option where you use back channels to pull some influence. Which also defeats the purpose of Agile...
everdev 7y ago
> If X is not done by this date we will lose Y dollars. That Y number is almost made up to make things more urgent. Sometimes it's real though. Clients might have to make a vendor decision by the end of a quarter for example and want a bug to be fixed or a feature to be added before they sign. In other cases, there might be a huge event and ad campaign where you have a limited timeframe to make a good first impression on a lot of potential customers. Deadlines suck but in certain cases they're very necessary.

pm90 7y ago

Agile works well when you’re working in a win win kinda relationship. What you describe happens more often than I am willing to admit. What helps here is if you hold Business Value meetings with real people involved and try to reason relative priorities of stories. This is the fuzzy, social aspect of Agile development but I suspect it’s really the core idea behind the whole thing: it forces people to talk in person and empathize more, hopefully building up cooperative relationships rather than extractive ones. If the stakeholders continue to be sociopaths though, you can either chose to give in and do whatever they say or lie. Both options break the spirit of the thing. Frequently there’s a 3rd invisible option where you use back channels to pull some influence. Which also defeats the purpose of Agile...

everdev 7y ago

> If X is not done by this date we will lose Y dollars. That Y number is almost made up to make things more urgent. Sometimes it's real though. Clients might have to make a vendor decision by the end of a quarter for example and want a bug to be fixed or a feature to be added before they sign. In other cases, there might be a huge event and ad campaign where you have a limited timeframe to make a good first impression on a lot of potential customers. Deadlines suck but in certain cases they're very necessary.