As an industry we waste so much time trying to predict how long things will take instead of putting our time and energy into building and iterating. The amount of bloat and complexity in IT is crippling. It's so bad now that there are frameworks to estimate how accurate your estimates are. Estimating your estimates. Crazy. 

What we think we need: a perfect map

What we really need: a general direction

We cannot forget: what creates value for a business is actually shipping software. The plan itself does not provide value on its own. It is valuable only to the extent that it results in better execution of the work. You only need a very thin layer of coordination to ship good software. Value is left rotting on the vine when we substitute extensive planning for execution and when we substitute executing "according to plan" for thinking and adapting on the fly. 

Spend more time doing work and less time talking about the work you want to do. Stop trying to predict the future, it's all going to change anyway. 

Also, isn't it time we let our teams focus on a smaller set of meaningful things instead of jamming backlogs full with endless amounts of busy work? More thoughts on this soon ... 

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