Engineering prioritization next enhancements

[damianavila]

Context

As part of our retros (among other discussions), it is quite clear we need to come up ASAP with a better way to produce a curated backlog with prioritized tasks that we can consume in out sprint planning meetings to create upcoming iterations.

Proposal

We have been discussing several ways to improve the process and one key decision was to create a sync meeting where we revisit the current backlog (in the Eng board), we refine the task and we "properly" prioritize them (from top to bottom and for each allocation) accoordingly to the perceived priority and contextual information we might have. We will further iterate on this process to gain experience, discover failures and make improvements.

cc @2i2c-org/engineering for visibility

Updates and actions

• We had one iteration of the backlog refinement meeting that works well.
• @haroldcampbell setup a monthly meeting.
• I (Damián) think a montly meeting is not the right cadence so, after discussing it with Harold, I updated the calendar invite to be a biweekly 30 min sync meeting (to have more iterations of the activity) which is "in sync" with the sprint retro/planning (to reduce the lag).
• We are still thinking the best way for people to participate in this process in a async fashion (more of that in an upcoming messaage).

[consideRatio]

I (Damián) think a montly meeting is not the right cadence so, after discussing it with Harold, I updated the calendar invite to be a biweekly 30 min sync meeting (to have more iterations of the activity) which is "in sync" with the sprint retro/planning (to reduce the lag).

With a montly meeting, I have a concern about our responsiveness to start acting on something is increased from two weeks up to a full months. This is of course acceptable for some things, but I think we are pushing it to have a responsiveness to support tickets and new hub requests (assuming they are "ready") to two weeks already. Would such reduced responsiveness be a consequence of this meeting being scheduled monthly as compared to being scheduled in sync with sprints?

With a monthly meeting, the scope of what is to be prioritized could need to be adjusted to just prioritize among only a subset of work items - leaving other work items to be prioritized per sprint in another meeting or similar. For example, the scope of the monthly prio could be "anything not being support tickets or new hub requests" initially.

With this comment, my wish is that its made clear what is to be prioritized in this monthly meet - because as soon as its not done in sync with sprints that becomes a question with no obvious answer - an explicit answer becomes relevant.