“How’s that feature coming?”
“I’m working on it.”
On many teams, work items take several days or even weeks to go from start to finish. And each team member is contributing to multiple items, often multiple items every day.
No one can accuse this team of being lazy—they’re actively working on lots of things! They’re keeping busy.
But this way of organizing work causes problems for customers, leaders, product owners, and for the team members themselves.
Customers get frustrated with delays and unpredictability. Leaders find it hard to do strategic planning and to give useful updates to their own stakeholders. Product owners struggle to manage a backlog well if they don’t have a good sense of what’ll be done when. And developers can get a sense of never accomplishing anything tangible while always being busy.
Want to see an immediate improvement in your team’s productivity, predictability, and motivation? Learn to organize your work so you’re getting small, valuable slices done every single day.
Each day, when you look at your work, ask, “How can I get this done today?” If the answer is, “I can’t. It doesn’t fit in a day,” that’s ok—lots of things are bigger than a day. But treat that as a signal to find a meaningful slice you can get done today. And when you expected to get something done in a day and you don’t get it done, treat that as a signal to get curious about what happened and what it can teach you for slicing work in the future.
Learn how to build this mindset of meaningful value into your team’s work at every level of detail in our Certified Scrum Product Owner workshop. Imagine ending every work day with a calm certainty, equipped with insights and techniques to discern early value, craft compelling visions, and communicate with unequivocal clarity.
Join Richard next week for 3 days of live, interactive learning that a recent participant described as, “one of the most valuable career investments I’ve ever made.”
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