Teams that are working at 100% capacity might feel like top “hustle mode.” Unfortunately, they are just racing towards a wall. When a surprise eventually happens—and they always do—they’re going to get everything crashing down. Rather than getting marginalized, let’s get some margin (pun kinda intended).
Disaster Waiting to Happen
Someone gets sick, quits, or creates a messy outage, and just like that, the team’s doomed. All its plans come tumbling down. Fully booking the team also means you won’t be able to quickly shift directions and use an opportunity that presents itself. You’re already so loaded that any extra bit has to wait or push everything.
And, of course, you’re getting a team that just cannot learn. It doesn’t have the time to experiment or even just take a second to think. They’re always heads down. That’s the “feature factory” mentality. A factory has a production line, but no creativity or innovation. That’s not the mentality tech companies ought to cultivate.
Recently, a CTO recounted how even the conversations to decide who could work on something are so backlogged that they’re heavily delayed in everything in the product timeline. Isn’t it ridiculous to get to a point where you cannot even discuss what to do because you cannot afford to lose those 30 minutes? Yet I bet that’s not far from what many of you reading this are experiencing.
Selling Margin
When asked how to make the case for extra margin to the CEO, I ask why reality isn’t enough. The fact is that allocating 100% is not working. Why keep pretending that it does? What does your CEO expect to happen when something pops up?
Frankly, people barely manage to get to all their meetings on time when they’re back-to-back, and that’s even when they just need to switch Zoom calls in between. Surely you can’t expect a team to be 100% loaded and never miss a beat when it comes to working on new features.
Slow Down to Ramp Up
This is actually required in order to improve and move faster. When we are too overloaded, we tend to bash our heads against the wall and just “work harder” to get things out the door. We never experiment or find it hard to be creative on a tight schedule.
Constraints are good, but not those that are so constrictive you can’t breathe. Here are a few approaches to start introducing margin into your org. I recommend trying them all and finding the right composition that works in your case.
Stop Allocating 100% of Your Time
There’s a reason why decades ago concepts such as story points and velocity calculations became popular: they provided us with a relatively easy-to-handle proxy to address load and plan how much we’re putting on our plates.
Find your general number, and only commit to a subset at the start of a sprint. If it’s 100% spoken for at the sprint kick-off, you’re setting the team to fail.
Plan for Bugs
If you regularly see time getting eaten up tackling regular issues, stop being surprised by it. Start planning for it and expect it to happen. It’s somewhat ridiculous to keep being surprised by the same thing happening regularly, don’t you think?
For example, have a rotating role to handle those incoming requests so that it doesn’t harm the team’s plan most of the time, and that dedicated person has fewer things on their plate precisely so that they would be available to handle these issues.
Create Time
Find ways to make work more efficient to free up time. For example, can you set up faster and easier systems to manage what your AI coding agent is doing, so that testing the output is fast and streamlined? Or, instead of prioritizing the next feature, how about prioritizing the automation of the smoke tests that are still being performed manually?
I recently heard my friend Luca Rossi of Refactoring fame tell how he’s managing to keep his open source project Tolaria on track, with bugs being solved within 24 hours, with just a couple of hours a day. He “created time” using heavy automation with OpenClaw. Investing in DX pays off.
Innovation Weeks / Intermissions
Bluntly claim time as margin. Have the team research and experiment. This is a foundational concept that I’ve been using with my clients in our work. Many more have implemented it after reading about it on The Tech Executive Operating System. You can too by clicking that link and grabbing the free sample chapter that covers exactly that.