Team & Organizational · master area
Team Capacity Planning
Monthly. Three numbers and a question. What would have to be true for the team to take on one more thing? If the answer is "nothing changes," the team is over capacity and is paying for it in chain debt.
Owners: Leadership, PO, Tech Lead Phase it lives in: Continuous The corpus principle this enacts: Cutting Discovery to ship faster trades a known cost for an unknown larger one.
Where it lives in the chain
- After We Build · The Team — capacity planning — the canon
How to do this
The monthly read, three numbers:
- Cycles in flight — how many initiatives is the team currently inside? More than half the team's capacity on first-cycle initiatives is the chain's standard limit.
- On-call recovery — when did the on-call last get a clean week? Cumulative on-call burnout shows up as silence in retros and slow review.
- Discovery debt — how many briefs are due for refresh and overdue? Old briefs ship the wrong thing; ageing briefs accumulate
observation-mismatchrisk.
Then the question: "what would have to be true for the team to take on one more thing?" If the answer is "someone leaves something half-done" or "we cut Discovery", the team is at capacity.
What good practice looks like
A new initiative is proposed. The PO opens the capacity read. "We have three initiatives in flight, the on-call last had a clean week six weeks ago, and two briefs are overdue. To take this, we'd need to kill one of the three in flight." The conversation moves to which to kill — not to how to fit more in.
The instinct under pressure is to shorten the cycle. The corpus is structured against that. Cutting Discovery to ship faster trades a known cost (a longer cycle) for an unknown cost (a feature that solves the wrong problem). The Discovery cost is paid in days. The wrong-problem cost is paid in months.
Related crafts
- On-Call Rotation — where recovery lives
- Psychological Safety — overload silences retros
- Kill Criterion — how to make room