> The focus is on delivering features and quality In my first month as VP at a growth stage startup, I asked everyone in Engineering why we used Jira. The res

> The focus is on delivering features and quality In my first month as VP at a growth stage startup, I asked everyone in Engineering why we used Jira. The responses all boiled down to what was basically a shrug. I followed up with what they felt we should use it for and the universal answer was just to be a scrum board, so I spent a bunch of time removing fields and nearly all workflow steps and rules enforcement except in cases where a particular team wanted them. This ruffled a few feathers of folks who loved making tools do all the work, but the improved QoL and happiness the team at made any objections moot. Similarly,I asked all the external stakeholders what they wanted out of the Engineering team, and the common answer was regular delivery of features and products. So now that's what we're optimizing our process around, and (not a surprise) that's been more of a "make the product team focus on fewer things", reduce architectural debt, and automate more things kind of effort. Now, estimation is still a big part of this, but it's used mostly for capacity planning and to gauge the effectiveness of efficiency related efforts.