How product teams should set deadlines
The article describes a predictive project-management approach, and it&#x27;s the same misguided focus on deadlines you hear from people with a predictive mindset. But an adaptive approach is so much more effective.<p>The adaptive approach: Products should ship as soon as they&#x27;re ready for market, not according to some deadline. To ship sooner, they should be sliced into pieces that have compelling individual value. Each piece is shipped when ready. And those pieces (&quot;valuable increments&quot;) should be sliced into even more pieces that <i>could</i> be shipped sooner in case new business opportunities come along. That way, when that new business opportunity comes along, you&#x27;re not left with a choice between abandoning work or ignoring the opportunity in favor of finishing what you started.<p>There <i>are</i> times when deadlines matter, such as regulatory requirements, tax season, the Christmas shopping season... but people who are &quot;setting deadlines&quot; aren&#x27;t talking about real deadlines; they&#x27;re talking about artificial deadlines because they think it&#x27;s the right way to manage software teams. (They don&#x27;t understand that managing by deadline causes teams to compromise internal quality, and that hurts productivity, which creates stress, which forms a vicious cycle that further harms quality and productivity.)<p>If you do have a real deadline, the correct way to manage the risk of missing that deadline is to, once again, use an adaptive approach: identify the smallest thing that will mitigate the risk, build that first, and then incrementally expand from there in as small pieces as possible. Keep the software shippable at every step of the way and ship on the deadline with whatever you finished.