> 1. You have some projects that are rigorously time bound (e.g. we absolutely need to ship X by Y date). Maybe scope is negotiable a bit but you definitely need results by a certain date.
In this case, you explicitly call out that roadmap item, and label it as "this thing will win out and other initiatives will be delayed if this thing goes sideways"
> 2. Implicitly all of your work is time bound. Even if you say "we want to get to a 60% reduction in support calls", the follow up question is "by when?". Tons of internal forces (employee reviews, shifting company priorities) shift the framing from "we think a 60% reduction in support calls is a healthy sustainable level for our business, and that is our goal" to "we are targeting a 20% reduction in support calls over the next six months". Then your multi-quarter big-bet projects need to be broken down into phases which won't have an impact on the support calls by themselves, so you have to take ship goals or create other goals to capture that work (not great).
Yes, you're right, I didn't write that one clearly. For outcomes like that, you should have defined "come up for air" dates where you measure and determine whether you keep going or call it as good enough/not worth it to continue and then move on to other things.
> 1. You have some projects that are rigorously time bound (e.g. we absolutely need to ship X by Y date). Maybe scope is negotiable a bit but you definitely need results by a certain date.
In this case, you explicitly call out that roadmap item, and label it as "this thing will win out and other initiatives will be delayed if this thing goes sideways"
> 2. Implicitly all of your work is time bound. Even if you say "we want to get to a 60% reduction in support calls", the follow up question is "by when?". Tons of internal forces (employee reviews, shifting company priorities) shift the framing from "we think a 60% reduction in support calls is a healthy sustainable level for our business, and that is our goal" to "we are targeting a 20% reduction in support calls over the next six months". Then your multi-quarter big-bet projects need to be broken down into phases which won't have an impact on the support calls by themselves, so you have to take ship goals or create other goals to capture that work (not great).
Yes, you're right, I didn't write that one clearly. For outcomes like that, you should have defined "come up for air" dates where you measure and determine whether you keep going or call it as good enough/not worth it to continue and then move on to other things.