> When an engineer says they need 4 weeks instead of 2 it's my responsibility as a manager to get into the details, not as a way to micro-manage but to help my team be more confident about the 4 weeks timelines.
As a manager, isn’t your job to understand the well-documented problems with direct time estimates of knowledge work even when the work is being estimated by subject-matter experts who regularly perform the type of work being estimated, and understand and coach your team on use of the known techniques with that mitigate that somewhat (among which “managers getting down in the weeds to ‘provide confidence’ is not particularly prominent), so that you develop as-decent-as-practical estimates with, over time, enmpirical error bars without unproductively wasting everyone’s time and morale in exercises that can be assured to, in general, fail to.refine them meaningfully, rather than engaging in self-deluded pop-management-culture self-ego-stroking approaches that let you feel useful, even though they are known to make estimates worse.
As a manager, isn’t your job to understand the well-documented problems with direct time estimates of knowledge work even when the work is being estimated by subject-matter experts who regularly perform the type of work being estimated, and understand and coach your team on use of the known techniques with that mitigate that somewhat (among which “managers getting down in the weeds to ‘provide confidence’ is not particularly prominent), so that you develop as-decent-as-practical estimates with, over time, enmpirical error bars without unproductively wasting everyone’s time and morale in exercises that can be assured to, in general, fail to.refine them meaningfully, rather than engaging in self-deluded pop-management-culture self-ego-stroking approaches that let you feel useful, even though they are known to make estimates worse.