Dude Who Stole My Engineering Capacity? By Mihnea Galeteanu and Jane Helman [Mind the Product]

What do you do if your engineering capacity is reduced by 30% each year? In this ProductTank Toronto talk, two members from the team at Points, Mihnea Galeteanu – Head of Product and Jane Helman – Head of Scrum, explain their coping strategy.

While sharing an insightful story of a group of indigenous people in Peru, they take us through:

• Roadmapping
• Prioritization

Watch the video to see their talk in full. Or read on for an overview of the key points.

Roadmapping

Having just come out of a roadmapping cycle for Points, Mihnea takes us through the process for building an effective roadmap. The first step is to identify the facts and the environment that your team is working in.

For Mihnea and Points they knew that every year 30% of the engineering capacity would be dedicated to product maintenance and thus be unavailable for the roadmap. When starting out a roadmap it needs to be clear that a lot of the initial features you plan to incorporate may not be possible without considering the environment. This includes how much capacity your team is able to handle.

To help cope with environmental constraints, it is important to understand what specific KPI is being solved with a new roadmap feature. This way you remain focused on the outcome and not the feature.

Also, it’s important for the product team to get outside and meet with customers to understand what they’re solving for. This can help them get a clearer understanding of what they’re trying to build and the outcome they want to create.

Prioritization

While dealing with multiple teams, prioritization can be a challenge for Jane as Head of Scrum. In the second part of the talk she explains how you can prioritize the requests of multiple engineering/product teams to meet overall outcome goals.

When prioritizing, she explains, it is important to consider factors like what feature will have the best strategic impact, budget and team requirements.

The final takeaways from this talk are that managing engineering capacity requires you to consider the restrictions of the company and the team. The focus should be on the overall outcome and desired achievements, instead of a perceived need.

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Source: Mind the Product https://www.mindtheproduct.com/dude-who-stole-my-engineering-capacity-by-mihnea-galeteanu-and-jane-helman/