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I love being manager A. I always start sprints/epics as manager A. In my experience 1 of 5 projects succeeds with Manager A and I get a very superior result with a solution I myself would have never thought of. Rainbows and unicorns everywhere!

But...the other 4 times I get either no solution, or the Upload button only works as long as one user at a time tries it, or only on Chrome when all customers use IE8, or the documents randomly disappear when new dockers spin up, or the button needed to be WCAG compliant and no one bothered checking, etc. Suddenly I am forced to be Manager B and no one is happy. The feature is 3x over budget and 3 weeks late.

What leading indicators can we use to predict or at least alert to a failing Manager A project early in the cycle so I can do what I love, devs can do what they love, biz stakeholders get things on time and on budget, and customers can get something they love?




> 3 weeks late

Whatever's going on, you gotta catch it sooner, right? Any way the stories can be smaller and get out to QA sooner?

Maybe you could try being "Manager AB"

Instead of a totally hands-off "Manager A" style maybe you can work more closely with them to develop those stories and make sure they understand what technical requirements (WCAG compliance, etc) each story needs to hit before they estimate them


Not hands off - just not spoon feeding. Manager A lets experts be experts and be creative and take responsibility but gives guidance and guidelines.

But experts are fallible, and distractions are many, and sometimes even experts get lazy or confused or overwhelmed.




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