Calendly commits to engineering dates only after finishing discovery and solutioning
Annie Pearl · Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth | Annie Pearl (CPO) · Feb 26, 2023 · at 36:31
Calendly CPO Annie Pearl discusses how the company manages product roadmaps and commits to delivery milestones based on immediate phase visibility.
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“Something we've done over the last year is, is really kind of moved to a model of, Talking about dates and promising and committing to dates that are within our control. And so if you think about kind of the product development lifecycle, you know, we can commit to a discovery effort of, you know, doing research around a certain problem space, and we can have a general sense of when we know that effort's going to conclude. We don't know if we're going to actually end up going and based on the results, whether we're actually moving forward with investing in that area, but that's a body of work we can commit to. From there, we then move into, okay, if this is something, a problem space we want to go after, we're going to go You know, work on a couple different solutions, and we're gonna go do some user testing, and we're gonna land on a solution, and that's another sort of phase we can commit to. Then, once we actually have that completed, and we actually know not just the problem, but the solution, we can do estimation planning and actually have a date, ah, for delivery from an engineering perspective. And so, we've gotten a lot better at making the commitments around the work that's right in front of us versus making a commitment around a project six months out when we haven't even done Enough discovery, enough design and ideation to have a real clear understanding of estimation.”
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