| I generally agree with your response. There is nuance and every project will be different and every team will be different. There was a PM post this last week[0] where I can cite possible flaws. The PM creating this post has engineering experience, so it's possible that he will make all of the correct decisions, but he is also centralizing a big portion of the decision making. That can be good, especially if he is of the PBFD variety. > "Do we absolutely need discount functionality at launch?" This is a good question to have. You want to only build the MVP. But if you don't know what it will take to build[1], then you can't make that decision. If you make that decision, and don't communicate to the team that you made that decision, and they build a product that needs to be completely redone once that feature needs to be done, that's not ideal. > "Which tasks depend on which other tasks?" This is a good question to have. Another good question is: What parts of these tasks can we work on even if the entire story is dependent on some other task? Is the entire job going to take at minimum 23 weeks, or can we on week 1 spend a bunch of time doing "product cart price calculation" spike engineering task, while at the same time doing a "shopping cart containing product" spike task. Then when we get to the story, suddenly the implementation of the entire pipeline can be completed in a single sprint. If your engineers only see the story when its popped off of the top of the backlog, they won't be able to accomplish that. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27906886 [1]: https://xkcd.com/1425/ |