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Derisking a project 1 year out
(i.imgflip.com)
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?
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 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.
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.