| I’ll go against the grain and say that fake deadlines are incredibly useful. They highlight unexpected costs, they force the team to bring forward hard decisions and push towards action. It’s the same as time boxing or pomodoro. You tell yourself it’ll take an hour. An hour later, you ask yourself what did you actually do and whether it makes sense how you spent your time. I don’t think fake deadlines should be external. Hard deadlines is for external teams depending on you like marketing or sales or a customer. Fake deadlines are for you to check in with yourself if things still make sense or if new decisions should be made because things didn’t turn out as expected. > If you think that a prototype might take a month, why not challenge the team to see what they can deliver by the end of the week? You will be surprised, and so will they. This is a great thought experiment but terrible for maintainability. It’s good to discuss what happens if we need it sooner, or what we could accomplish if we had more time. It’s bad to waste a week and commit to the bad decisions we make to meet a 1-week deadline when we all think 1 month is more reasonable. Young people have a tough time pushing back. This technique is great for senior people, but juniors are just going to burn out. You have to be super careful with your language and be pretty clear that the pressure here is hypothetical. |