Happy Friday,

Yesterday I hosted the webinar, "Lies Our Engineering Metrics Tell Us."

You can watch the replay of it here.

You may have noticed that it's a new YouTube channel. I created it today to slowly move my leadership/technical content there to get it away from my beekeeping content.

One of the questions that came up in the webinar was what I thought was the biggest lie in engineering metrics. I thought for a second and said that I thought it was estimation theatre.

The thing that led me to that was that its failure is so normalized that we do all the work around estimation, even though we don't believe what it says. Our industry has failed with this for so long that they've internalized that this is the way it must be. We don't even try to address it; we just hope that if we do more, it will be different next time.

Let's go further. Think of all the meetings that happen to manage this. We have rounds of estimation, often with different groups. Then we have more meetings to make sense of how that might look in the overall plan. We have other meetings to pad and round out those things. Then we have dozens of touch-base meetings to confirm how "off" our estimates are.

When I think about how one ineffective practice cascades, it kind of blows my mind.

So here's the real question: Is there a reality where we get the benefits of "estimation" without the fuss?

A reality where groups can present what they know, it's trusted, and instead of dozens and dozens of meetings to manage, there are only a few strategic ones to act on what the information is telling them.

I say there is. What about you?

Sincerely,

Ryan

Opportunties

Over the years, I've helped lots of engineering teams and leaders. I've built teams that showed 10x improvement in speed, quality, and satisfaction. I've helped companies pioneer their first-ever profitable SaaS products. I'd like to work with you next. If you or your leaders:

• Have backlogs of work that always grow faster than you can keep up with
• Too many bugs that take away from producing useful code
• A product that feels like a feature factory instead of having an impact
• Confusion about how to use metrics to lead your teams or organization
• Need to experiment with agentic development practices

Schedule a call with me.