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About this episode
Tobias Grant hired a full-time planner before his fifth engineering manager at Northbeam. The role didn't exist in most companies their size.
We talk about what that person actually did each week, why roadmaps got shorter and why the team stopped missing dates.
In this episode
0:00 The fifth manager we didn't hire
12:10 What a planner does
25:40 Shorter roadmaps
35:20 Three things to borrow
Three things to borrow
Give planning an owner. Everyone wanted better planning. Nobody wanted to do it every day until it was someone's job.
Plan six weeks, not six months. Shorter roadmaps were easier to hit and easier to change.
Track dates, not velocity. The planner reported one thing each week: which commitments were at risk.
Mentioned in the episode
How I read 200 sources a week without drowning.
Transcript
Leo: Tobias, why a planner?
Tobias: Because every manager I interviewed wanted to fix planning, and none of them wanted to do it every day.
Leo: What does the planner do on a normal Monday?
Tobias: Walks through every commitment with the leads and flags the ones at risk. That's most of it. It sounds small. It changed everything.
Leo: Did the managers mind?
Tobias: For about a month. Then they realized they had their afternoons back.
The guest
Tobias Grant
VP Engineering, Northbeam
Tobias leads engineering at Northbeam, an analytics company of 120 people.
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