This is a summary of https://apenwarr.ca/log/20171213, a very long and interesting article. I'm trying to present here only the ideas that are immediately relevant to our situation.
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A lot of the article deals with scaling production operations and efficiency and examines the rate of bugs, postulates theories about how to manage projects and bugs and runs some statistical experiments to illustrate the postulated ideas.
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Efficiency comes from smart project management.
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Arbitrary, output-oriented goals to be met at the end of some deadline don't work, because they don't create urgency until the last minute, then fail to be effective, leading to a vicious cycle. While managers need goals and targets and estimates to plan ahead internally, estimation and goals should not be communicated to dev teams as such.
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Do not get into a situation where engineers negotiate schedules with management. Motivation, project estimation, feature prioritization are all psychologi