French-Owen: Asking engineers individually in 1-on-1s prevents timeline anchoring
Calvin French-Owen · Startup Technology - Technical Founder Advice · Y Combinator · Oct 10, 2018 · at 43:57
Calvin French-Owen, CTO of Segment, shares his management heuristic for accurately forecasting engineering deadlines.
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“Kind of the trick that I've started using is in one-on-ones actually asking each person what they think will happen over the next three or four weeks. And what I find asking one to one is that one people don't anchor against each other's answers. So you get a very unbiased view, and it, like, forces each person to think about the near-term future, what's going to happen, and second, each person is much more wary of the parts that they didn't work on, and so you get kind of a sense of, like, where there might be trouble spots, and typically, the end result is sort of like a wisdom of the crowds, where it's kind of the average of all three or four answers, and so I've started using that as a way to get A better sense of deadlines, where each person has their prediction or mental model of what's going to happen, and then you kind of average them all out to where it should be.”
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