Always reminds me of the famous Douglas Adams quote: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
In seriousness, the author is right. Deadlines don't work as a tool to coerce people to work faster/better. Unless you have a detailed plan to get there; in which case the deadline is less important. It's just the last step of the plan. You'll know long before the deadline whether you are on track. Scrambling a few days before the deadline when you realize you are definitely not going to make it is probably doing more damage than good. And there's only so much that you can pull off in a few days. Doing that means you've already failed and you are just trying to cover it up.
A useful tool to get out of a deadline driven / firefighting style of project management is to switch to simply releasing often and frequently managing the pace at which a team releases new things and improves their software and prioritizing the next things to do correctly. We do a weekly all hands meeting where we take a few minutes to call out new/improved things. It's a very positive meeting where we celebrate progress. The flip side is that it's very visible if you have nothing to show. So, it creates a pressure to show something meaningful.
The rest is just normal planning. I set the goals for the team on a month by month basis and drive things forward. This in turn is done based on a roadmap that we revise every quarter. We identify themes where we want to do better. If I set the bar too high, I simply end up with a pile of unfinished things that spill over into the next month. You actually need to keep the queue of changes small and create space for people to do the job properly. Piling on more stuff actually reduces the likelihood of anything getting done or done properly.
We're a startup and we release often so there's no question about there being something to release because there always is a usable version of the software. Our sales people have been instructed to sell what we have, not what they'd like us to have. That just creates pressure to deliver random crap that they thought the customer wanted to hear. Usually exactly the wrong thing to begin with.
We talk only about things we already finished and know we can deliver externally. If you run a startup, stop talking about what you are going to have and start talking about what you already have does wonders for your credibility and sales. Unless what you have is nothing of course. In that case you fake it until you make it (or fail).
And there's also very little doubt about what it is we're releasing. It's literally what we showed last week + some small changes that we can do this week.
People get motivated by noticeable progress. Makes them want to do more of it. It's great to see this working. Our velocity is crazy good.
In seriousness, the author is right. Deadlines don't work as a tool to coerce people to work faster/better. Unless you have a detailed plan to get there; in which case the deadline is less important. It's just the last step of the plan. You'll know long before the deadline whether you are on track. Scrambling a few days before the deadline when you realize you are definitely not going to make it is probably doing more damage than good. And there's only so much that you can pull off in a few days. Doing that means you've already failed and you are just trying to cover it up.
A useful tool to get out of a deadline driven / firefighting style of project management is to switch to simply releasing often and frequently managing the pace at which a team releases new things and improves their software and prioritizing the next things to do correctly. We do a weekly all hands meeting where we take a few minutes to call out new/improved things. It's a very positive meeting where we celebrate progress. The flip side is that it's very visible if you have nothing to show. So, it creates a pressure to show something meaningful.
The rest is just normal planning. I set the goals for the team on a month by month basis and drive things forward. This in turn is done based on a roadmap that we revise every quarter. We identify themes where we want to do better. If I set the bar too high, I simply end up with a pile of unfinished things that spill over into the next month. You actually need to keep the queue of changes small and create space for people to do the job properly. Piling on more stuff actually reduces the likelihood of anything getting done or done properly.
We're a startup and we release often so there's no question about there being something to release because there always is a usable version of the software. Our sales people have been instructed to sell what we have, not what they'd like us to have. That just creates pressure to deliver random crap that they thought the customer wanted to hear. Usually exactly the wrong thing to begin with.
We talk only about things we already finished and know we can deliver externally. If you run a startup, stop talking about what you are going to have and start talking about what you already have does wonders for your credibility and sales. Unless what you have is nothing of course. In that case you fake it until you make it (or fail).
And there's also very little doubt about what it is we're releasing. It's literally what we showed last week + some small changes that we can do this week.
People get motivated by noticeable progress. Makes them want to do more of it. It's great to see this working. Our velocity is crazy good.