Lean Product Management

Feature black holes that suck up a product team's time

Even when product backlogs are groomed well, there is a type of donkey work or feature black hole that swallows up team time. This kind of grunt work slowly creeps in and before you know it, a significant amount of the team time gets sucked up into it. It could come in as requests from powerful folks in leadership. It could come as a result of frustration with operational tools. It even creeps in as spillovers from heavy processes. For instance, if every request for new hardware, infrastructure, stationery, and so on has to go through an elaborate approval process, then the amount of time the team spends just waiting on approvals to be processed can be a process waste. So, the teams may end ...