Recently, one of the engineers on my team asked for a deadline. I refused to set one, then the CTO jumped in and also refused. It made me very happy and I bet it doesn’t happen at many companies, so I want to share why we did that in the hope that it convinces you to stop setting deadlines too.

My Perfect Team

Let me tell you about my perfect team – I’ve been on it several times.

Developers, a business analyst, a product owner, a QA and a designer sit together around a big table with no walls, dividers or big monitors in between them. We’re just a few people with our laptops, collaborating closely every day and pairing with each other across all roles.

We know how to iterate and have scoped out the earliest usable version of our product and the right level of fidelity.

We’ve written great stories according to INVEST principles and prioritised them very carefully so that we’re working on the most important things first. 

We’re united by our shared commitment to a common purpose. We care about what we’re doing and work at our best sustainable speed – challenging ourselves but not getting stressed.

Our team is vertical and autonomous – we have all the skills and authority we need to achieve our goals.

Setting a Deadline

Now that you know our team, I want to ask you a question. What will you gain by giving us a deadline?

Will we go faster? We’re already going at our best sustainable speed. Maybe people could work longer hours, but we only have so much mental energy to use and our work is intellectually demanding. Even if we do manage to get more done for a while, it will increase turnover and that will cost more than its worth.

Will you actually have any more certainty about when our work will be finished? You’ll have a date, but in your experience, have those dates really been reliable?

So we trade some possible short-term speed for increased turnover and we get a magic date that – if we are honest about our experience – we know we should not trust. And what will it cost?

Well, you’ll almost certainly guarantee that the work will not be delivered before the deadline.

For the deadline to be credible, the team will have to conduct regular agile estimation and velocity measurement. That will take a lot of time, delaying delivery.

The external pressure will impact the team’s sense of autonomy, further damaging morale and increasing turnover.

Finally, external knowledge of the deadline will create a false impression of certainty that encourages timeline based programme management. We’ll end up with a fragile, interdependent series of timelines that falls apart as soon as the first deadline is missed.

Move On

I know it’s hard to let go of deadlines, but we have to move on. Accept uncertainty. Stop being obsessed with what we can’t control and focus on what we can.

  • Replace talking about time with talking about scope and fidelity
  • Replace velocity measurement and estimation with better story writing and story slicing
  • Replace timeline setting with prioritisation
  • Replace external deadline pressure with shared commitment to a common purpose
  • Replace timeline-based programme management with creativity and concurrency