Liars Club

Liars

It's the fear that wakes us up
The truth that things are such
A mess
Far beyond repair
— Coheed and Cambria (Liars Club)

Story points are one of the banes of my existence as a manager. They're an artifact of a conversation the full team had. They are not a number pulled out of a shit-filled toilet bowl like your cell phone after too much tequila at the club, wiped off and handed to someone more responsible.

Story pointing, modified Fibonacci sequencing, and t-shirt sizing aren't in the Scrum Guide. They're not in the Agile Manifesto. They were bolted on like a pair of fake tits to make upper management turn their head so they could get a view of the estimations they're desperately ogling.

You wrote: "Product doesn't care about complexity. They shouldn't. Product cares about timelines. The company needs coordination."

You're right that Product needs timelines. But here's what they're actually asking for: Fast, Cheap, and Right. You can't have all three. That's physics, not negotiation. What it sounds like is they want it right, on their timeline, and at the price they expect. That's not going to happen.

I've been caught in that situation and paid the price for telling the truth about estimations. So I learned to question the intent outright: "What about this feature needs to go out so soon? Can we adjust the scope to make sure we get what you need to know out as fast as possible?" "Is this needed for the product to be considered minimally viable, or is this scope creep?" "With this release, what are we trying to test, and can we redefine it to make sure you get what you're looking for?"

These questions will help you gain a deeper understanding of Product. They have absolutely no clue what they're doing. Which doesn't do a lot for your upward mobility in the company.

Based on what you've described—developers sizing work individually, Product treating points as commitments—it sounds like your team is task pointing, not story pointing.

A story is a unit of business value delivered to the customer. I have never seen one developer do that alone. So if you're sizing work that one developer can complete in isolation, you're not sizing stories. You're sizing tasks. And task points are completely useless because they tell you nothing about delivering value.

Of course management turns task points into timelines. The team handed them numbers that look like measurements. But they're not. They're guesses about technical complexity with no connection to customer value.

Of the things you have control over, I would start there. Stop wasting time giving ammo to upper management on Jira tickets that aren't actually stories. Unless it has business value to the customer, it doesn't get a point value.

Management wants numbers they can put in Gantt charts. The team is giving them task points that mean nothing. Everyone's participating in a fiction where we pretend we're measuring something real.

Or do you want me to lie?
'Cause I can do it baby
I can do it, lie to you
Please ask me to
'Cause life feels so much better
When we just avoid the truth
Baby, are you okay
To lie with me?
— Coheed and Cambria (Liars Club)

That's what story points have become—a lie we all agree to tell so Product can have their timelines and management can have their metrics.

Like the saying goes, "The points don't matter."

I had a team where upper management would take our numbers, use them to create timelines for deliverables, and then use those numbers individually in performance reports. We held a meeting—one of the nerdiest I've ever been part of—where we talked about who would win in a fight between all the Avengers. With this list in tow and not given to anyone outside the team, we started sizing stories by Avengers.

Needless to say, two Spidermen and a Hulk during one sprint wasn't something managers knew how to interpret. But the team did.

I've tried my hardest since that day to ensure that if we need to start sizing things, we do it in anything but numbers. They're too prone for people to think they can do math with them. Story points aren't made of numbers, and velocity—the average amount of story points over a given time—is a complete and utter waste of a metric that will only lie to you.

Chris,

It's your job to sit down with Product and figure out a timeline of what deliverables can be given when. Not to feed them numbers they'll misuse.

So here's what I want to know:

What are you doing to make sure your team is delivering stories that actually matter instead of sizing random tasks?

What conversations are you having with Product about what actually needs to ship versus what they wish could ship?

And seriously—do you think Thor had a chance against the Hulk, even after Ragnarok?

You're going to be doing some brave and needed culture change stuff soon at the company, and I don't envy you that. It's definitely needed though.

I hope that helps.