Having a Bench is a Good Thing
Look around at the folks on your team, and ask yourself “ Is everyone tasked with stuff? ”, and, “ Is everybody busy with tickets?” . In short, Is utilization at capacity? Ok, you did that, right? I’m guessing that the answer to the above questions either is, or should be, “ YES ”, right? And — if you’re the product manager/lead/whatever — you’re probably patting yourself on the back, and feeling pretty happy about it, right? Oh, you might have issues on the margin (“ Well, Bob could be a bit busier, and Alice is about to run out of stuff to do… ”), but by and large, you’re good, no? Well, the answer is NO , and you shouldn’t be happy about this, not by a long shot. You see, “ High utilization of resources will improve performance ” is one of the major fallacies in Product Management (•). Wait, what? If you max out your resource utilization, performance suffers? How can that be? Well, it’s because we’ve all grown up either ignoring queues, or im...