> Saying that actually customers don't need to be able to make plans, or marketing doesn't need to be able to advertise, is effectively saying that your employe

> Saying that actually customers don't need to be able to make plans, or marketing doesn't need to be able to advertise, is effectively saying that your employer doesn't need to make any money. That's not at all what I said. I said, if you choose to make management more efficient to the detriment of the people making the thing your company sells, you've made a bad choice. Bad managers like story points because it usually doesn't hurt their heads too much to add and compare scalar values. But a story point doesn't come anywhere close to representing the complexity of building any product. I've had one or two bad managers who wanted to make all things subservient to their precious Excel file. The productivity of that team (when the manager and story points process were introduced) plummeted and the entire team quit within a month of each other leaving. The best managers I have had have worked by discussing customer and business needs with engineering and walking away with a richer picture of the tasks involved and an estimated timeline. It is very hard work to do this—it usually takes someone with a little knowledge of how software engineering works. I've had good product managers like this and I've been able to deliver some of the highest-value code I've written (measured strictly monetarily) thanks to managers who took a rich, nuanced view of the process. I am not advocating for no management or no planning. I am advocating for management not requiring over-simplified metrics because it makes their life easier. Management does not exist to make its own tasks easier. It exists to make it easier for the people making the product to build the right thing at the right time and sell it. You can make plans without story points.