Your Playbook for Scoping Technical Work

Hey friend,

I've been asking you a few questions over the past few months.

And "how to manage scope," "technical scoping," etc., remains a theme. Hence, today's newsletter is going to be dedicated to that.

Our goal with Scoping 🥅

Ultimately, the goal is to get the project done in the time mentioned and be able to forecast how long it will take so more future work can be planned. Scoping work requires a few things.

You need to identify the requirements, ensure they are defined accurately, and manage and complete them effectively.

Scoping work can be divided into 3️⃣ parts:

• Scope: Defining the Project work
• Resources: Number of Engineers that will work on it
• Time: How long will the work take?

Well, then, you can create a list of questions for yourself.

What part of the Checkout experience should be rebuilt? What is the definition of checkout? Is it the Shopping Bag page, and when the user clicks the checkout button and makes the actual purchase? Or does it not include the Bag Page?

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Typically, your product partner defines these in a Project Requirement document. Add comments in that document and ensure you understand the high-level scope of what is expected and needs to be delivered. Ultimately, it is your job to ensure that the work gets delivered on time, so you want to avoid any unexpected scenarios as early as possible.

Important questions to ask 🚀

• Is this a critical project with a strict timeline?
• How will you slowly roll out the project as the Checkout experience breaking will have a serious impact on the business?
• Who are the stakeholders in this work?
• Is there marketing involved as well?
• Is there a copywriting team rewriting the copy on the new checkout experience?

Make sure you are aware of who cares about this work. But, start setting expectations in the scoping phase.

You can use this formula while scoping 🧪.

Since Dev time != calendar time, due to meetings, interviews, and holidays.

Since there are always tasks that you don’t realize you need to do until much later, such as refactoring old code, debugging unexplainable behaviours, and adding tests.

The more experienced you are at scoping, the smaller this multiplier will get.

A few challenges during Scoping 👇

• Unrealistic expectations and timelines
• Being unaware of all the Stakeholders involved
• Not adding enough buffer, which leads to team frustrations

Did you find this newsletter on Scoping useful? Share it with your friends!

🧰 The Engineering Leader's Toolbox

• Satya Nadella has truly turned out Microsoft, and this is a great article on his strategies, check it out ↗️​
• More on Satya's leadership example ↗️​
• 🎁 Grab a free copy of Managing up Template: Manage your Manager ↗️​

Have a great day,

Ankita

P.S.

What is the #1 thing you want to improve with your Leadership skills?

→ Improve communication & collaboration skills and strategies​

→ Learn strategies to deal with difficult stakeholders​

→ Manage technical scope​

→ Grow folks at different levels​

→ Shifting mindset: Moving from a technical role to leadership​

→ Scale my team and hire more​

→ Learn how to lead and grow into a badass leader​

→ Grow from Intermediate/Senior Dev to a confident leader​

→ Feel comfortable interviewing for an Engineering Manager role​