Why Communication is More Important Than Planning

We spend a lot of time planning. Your leadership expects you to have a plan. PMs develop a product roadmap in partnership with Engineering. Your team expects you to communicate what they’ll work on. There are many methodologies to help drive organizational alignment around proactive planning.

However, consider how much effort goes towards unplanned work! How many of your senior engineers are working on things that are not on a list? Customer issues, production incidents, incremental tooling/polish, etc. are all things you can’t put on a roadmap, but benefit immensely from increased awareness and communication.

In this session we’ll talk about strategies for how to handle the unplanned, the reactive, and the low-severity incremental work that is normal and healthy for a fast-moving team.