How do you balance "must do" work (compliance, maintenance, etc.) with objective/goal oriented work?

Before jumping into the "must do" work, it's best to understand the reason for doing the work.  Sometimes the "must do" work is warranted. For example, compliance could have high customer impact which naturally means that it'll get prioritized anyways. Sometimes the "must do" work is not impactful. For example, there might be a set of maintenance tasks that is necessary but it's highly manual and repetitive. While it needs to be done, it's more exciting for the team to reduce/eliminate this work ...Read More

The best way that I've found to manage this is to fund these out of separate envelopes. Typically I will work with engineering to agree on the base % allocation of resources for the first set of items. Let's say it's 20%. That leaves about 70-75% of capacity for feature work (you need to leave 5-10% on a team for slack/unplanned work like incidents). Great, now you know how many FTE-equivalents you have in a given period to do features. As engineering estimates (they are estimating, right?!) eff ...Read More

The balance/percentage should be agreed upon by the EM and the PM and shared with the broader org for visibility. For example, in a team of 5 engineers, one engineer's time could be set aside for 'must do' work and the rest will continue to focus on goal strategic efforts. Similar approach can be applied if the organization is big - eg. one pod assigned for maintenance work and 2 pods working on strategic efforts.  In the end, key is alignment with the broader organization and stakeholders so ri ...Read More

The main risk is constantly deprioritizing the Compliance and maintenance work and building a tech debt at such a level that it will take forever to pay it back.  There are two kinds of situations: 1- you do not have a vast tech debt, and you can manage compliance and maintenance work by allocating a fraction (10 to 30%, depending on the amount of work)of your capacity to this work. The remaining capacity work on development-related work. Alternatively, whenever a developer touches a part of the ...Read More