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The great tug of war: why everyone’s fighting over development time (and how to fix it)

Ever feel like your software development team is the rope in a corporate tug of war? On one side, customer projects are pulling for urgent enhancements and changes with fixed deadlines. On the other side, product management wants to push new revenue-generating concepts into the roadmap. And somewhere in the mix, you’ve got legal requirements, bug fixes, and a whole list of “must-haves” from various departments—all competing for the same developer hours.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many software companies struggle to balance multiple priorities. The result? Missed deadlines, internal and external frustration, last-minute scrambles, and half-baked requirements. In this post, we’ll explore why everyone’s fighting for development time—and the things you are in your approach to stop the chaos.

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The recruiting process I used to build Team SNAP

In 2022 I set out to build a new ServiceNow development Team for my department. This is the story of how I found 6 developers, a business analyst and two product owners in 7 months. In case you are wondering why two product owners, one product owner left after four months.

The principles behind the search

I learned a lot from executing the hiring process repeatedly. These are the principles I used throughout the hiring process.

Take the stress out of it. There is a good chance you’ll make a hiring mistake. You spend about 3-5 hours with a candidate before offering them a job. That is not enough time to learn everything there is to know about a person and how they work. Would you get engaged with someone after taking for 5 hours? That is basically how this process works. Do everything you can to have a solid process. But don’t expect the process to deliver perfect results.

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A design thinking workshop in the times of CODIV

Sometimes pressure and time constraints lead to some interesting ideas. In September, with very short notice I prepared and ran a Design Thinking workshop for my team that paid for itself three times: my team learned a few new things, we worked on our product and we had a lot of fun. 

Here is the recipe for the workshop

  1. Consider each of the user groups of your product
  2. Create a team for each user group (two people can be a group)
  3. Each team goes through the design thinking process for their user group

My team of eight was split into four groups of two, each team with the task of going through the design thinking process with one user group of the product we are building together. All resources where prepared so that the workshop could be done remotely.

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Test ideas with design thinking

If you cringed when you read the title, then this article is for you. I was in your shoes when I did my first design thinking workshop, skeptical. Eight years later I can say that the design thinking process and the skills you develop by using the process have been invaluable at work and my personal life.

Here are my top three reasons why you might want to take another look at design thinking and incorporate it into everything you do. 

Photo by Dan-Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash
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Complexity and story points

Story points as a measure of effort

In agile methodologies, the story point is used as a way to estimate the effort  it would take to complete a piece of work. The inputs to estimate story points are the complexity of the task and the amount of times that the task must be executed. 

During agile rituals (sometimes called meetings), the number of story points for a task is estimated by all the members of an agile team. The value of this estimation process is two fold. 

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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Three steps to getting user stories right

The user story is a great way to put yourself in the “user” seat and do a reality check for whether what you are planning to build is something the “user” really needs or wants. The user story formula goes

As a [user description]
I [want, need, wish] to [some goal]
so that [some benefit].

Though this formula appears simple, I often see it applied in the wrong way.

Post its on the wall.

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Designing a cohesive brand experience

In a small business, it is often the case that a single employee can play a critical role in boosting (or sinking) the business’s brand. And so it is important that at every touchpoint a potential customer receives a consistent message. In today’s world we focus a lot on the digital realm but I want to explain how to do this across both the digital and analog worlds in a way that showcases a business’s values.

efoxx Hair logo
efoxx Hair salon façade.

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