Is It Really Urgent? Let Your Product Owner Decide!
Why developer priorities shouldn’t be set in private Slack messages.
On a random Monday between two meetings in the morning, you get a Slack direct message:
“Hi, Tom here from Team A. We need you to fix issue B immediately. We are using your API as an important dependency, and this blocks important feature F! Please do it ASAP!”
Oh no!
You don’t want to block them, right?
It must be fixed, right?
It depends. Why? Let me explain:
Every task has an importance and an urgency in a specific context. The contexts are the company as a whole, Team A, and your own team. Importance and urgency have to be defined by the stakeholders and product owners.
Additionally, every person that messages you has a different ability to communicate importance and urgency. Sometimes people are just bad communicators, and it seems an issue is not important — although it is. Sometimes people have great communication skills and can introduce a great sense of urgency, although in the context of the whole company and your team, it is not. Maybe it isn’t even urgent in their own team — the person just wants to see their request fulfilled immediately for their own sake.
But isn’t this a bit theoretical?
There is a simple real-world solution if you are a developer: Make this discussion public and involve your product owner.
The product owner knows best each ticket’s importance and urgency and has the stakeholders on their short list. If you shift your tickets and follow the urge of some direct message, you make it harder for the product owner. Now the sprint is no longer as expected, and the board doesn’t reflect reality anymore.
How do you handle unexpected urgent requests in your team?