“Limit WIP” is a well-known recommendation in agile circles. It’s great except for the situations where it doesn’t work, eg. you have multiple customers with must-do features, you have support commitments and bugs to fix, your work doesn’t cleanly divide into [team size] pieces, etc.
But particularly for small teams pre-PMF it is good directional advice, as folks seem to err on the side of trying to do too much in parallel. And even if you don’t _actually_ only work on one headline, having exec buy in for the general approach is great for focus.
> “Limit WIP” is a well-known recommendation in agile circles. It’s great except for the situations where it doesn’t work, eg. you have multiple customers with must-do features, you have support commitments and bugs to fix, your work doesn’t cleanly divide into [team size] pieces, etc.
This is exactly where you want to limit work in progress and have your management or leadership earn the big bucks by managing your multiple customers with must-do features expectations.
The way you get work to done is to focus on getting it done, not adding more work. Limited work in progress doesn't mean they can't be parallel efforts and most teams do that. It means that we figure out how much the team can do at once before it slows work delivery down and stick to that. Nothing is exact so some leeway is expected.
Kanban does have the possibility of expediting bug fixes or other work disrupting priorities, but it does mean that other work is done later and that needs to be managed by leadership with your customers and stakeholders.
“Limit WIP” is a well-known recommendation in agile circles. It’s great except for the situations where it doesn’t work, eg. you have multiple customers with must-do features, you have support commitments and bugs to fix, your work doesn’t cleanly divide into [team size] pieces, etc.
But particularly for small teams pre-PMF it is good directional advice, as folks seem to err on the side of trying to do too much in parallel. And even if you don’t _actually_ only work on one headline, having exec buy in for the general approach is great for focus.