No one understands Points, and most don't care! (oknext.io)

Certainly not the C-Suite. Or the designers. Or the sales team. Or marketing. The product team just wants to know if it’ll be easy and how long it’ll take. Most engineers definitely don’t!

For those of you that don’t know, Points are the unit of measurement of complexity of a new feature in a software project. There are several benefits of using Points.

Biggest benefits of using Points:

• Points remove time pressure - the team focuses on whats most important and not what can be fit into a limited amount of time.
• Points measure team effort - the whole team (including product managers and designers estimate on work together). The team therefore takes responsible.

Then, there are major downsides.

• Points remove time pressure, meaning that they can not be used for project management! A project is defined by a fixed amount of work done with limited resources (human, financial and time).
• Knowing how long something might take is how everyone else does work! Time is a key variable in determining the benefit of a new feature. Refusing to provide a time estimate - even an overblown one is a source of daily friction between engineers and everyone else.
• Since Points are a team metric, and changes to the team changes their meaning, a team’s prior Points estimates can not be used to benchmark the performance for the updated team. Any attempt to do so can be easily gamed by inflating estimates.
• One is still forced to figure out another way to measure individual performance.

Just Use Time. Yes, even for Agile teams.

• It forces teams to account for cases where they can’t accurately estimate, leading to better estimates.
• Using time to estimate lets the rest of the organization better synchronize their efforts with the software team - just as they do with every other type of engineering team.
• When the team changes, if needed, individual participation can be used to benchmark the updated team’s performance.
• Time can still be used when the specs aren’t detailed enough just as points are currently used.
• The value generated by individuals can be directly tied back to their work.

OkNext.io uses Time to estimate effort. This allows all team members to use the same system to track tasks, estimate effort, plan and prioritize their upcoming tasks. Less friction. Just get things done!