The other day I was reading this Gergely tweet and I realized how true it is.

At my current team at Wallbox, we follow a kind of Scrum way of organizing our work. We plan sprints of two weeks keeping our Q goals as important tasks to accomplish.

Every now and then somebody from another team or a manager it comes with some urgent task we need to do asap. Most of the time our EM manages to stop it so the team doesn’t suffer the pressure of having to stop what is doing and have to argue if that is really that important. The funny thing is that the times this gets to the team mostly would have been totally avoidable with a good preparation because it turned out that wasn’t something that came out that recently.

So let’s review some key pillars to know if it’s worth it changing our focus.

Business Impact

This is key, if it’s something with very low impact there is no motivation to stop being focused on our OKR’s. But if they really have it’s a different story.

Maybe some country changed the regulation and this might block us from selling chargers there, then it’s ok. Perhaps some users are not being able to charge their EV for some bug. All these kinds of situations would be a real trigger to stop doing what we are doing.

Clear Requirements

We really need to have precise requirements if not we’ll probably have to redo that even before releasing it. So without that, we shouldn’t change our focus.

To have those requirements we might need to synchronize with other teams, maybe asking product guys too.

Work Estimation

Even if the two previous points are clear the team needs to do a good estimation. This can’t come from outside the team since just the team itself knows more than anybody how much work will be.

Cost

Once all it’s clear then upper management needs to understand the cost of this change of focus. Because other goals will be delayed so they need to know which impact will have on the team’s expected delivery.