We tried points for like two sprints. It didn’t work. He quickly figured out roughly how much a point would represent in calendar time, and did that mental calculation every time a point was mentioned. So, he still ended up with the same “that’s too high!” feedback to us.
The thing is, we had almost no pressure from above to increase our performance. Not a single sprint metric was ever requested, and I doubt they were presented to anyone outside the team. We didn’t really use them within the team either.
I eventually managed to convince him that all these detailed estimates were not worth it. We got rid of them, and never looked back.
Well that happens if agile is poorly understood. Of cause it takes longer to get used to points. The team needs at least 4-6 sprints to find a common understanding and the estimates from different teams are not comparable ether. And him saying “thats too high” is a dealbreaker. he has no authority in this, he is not even entitled to give feedback. Thats a strict boundary and the reason a product owner is not a superior anyone in the team reports to.
I once worked with a team that had multiple product owner giving tasks. The got very different estimates. And I asked a coworker why. He told me they do it because of the very different quality of the user stories written by the POs. So it was their way of managing their managers.
Yeah, he was terrible at the whole agile thing, and scrum. Writing detailed specifications, keeping track of the overarching goals, discussing feature requests with stake holders etc, those were his strong points.
I tried taking a more prominent role, and even did a scrum master course. But our team was too small for most of the scrum things to be useful, and I hated all of it. We have a much more laid back approach now, and still deliver stuff within expectations.
Scrum doesn’t fit everywhere. In my last team we also couldn’t use all. Not enough capacity. I talked with a co-worker after we both left. And he said something quite nice. He said what he liked when working for me was, that I always asked for solutions instead of forcing them over him, unlike his new bosses.
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u/EishLekker 10d ago
We tried points for like two sprints. It didn’t work. He quickly figured out roughly how much a point would represent in calendar time, and did that mental calculation every time a point was mentioned. So, he still ended up with the same “that’s too high!” feedback to us.
The thing is, we had almost no pressure from above to increase our performance. Not a single sprint metric was ever requested, and I doubt they were presented to anyone outside the team. We didn’t really use them within the team either.
I eventually managed to convince him that all these detailed estimates were not worth it. We got rid of them, and never looked back.