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Comment by AtNightWeCode | Hacker News Reader

Just by switching from Scrum to Kanban one can improve progress a lot. For being two very similar pull based systems the difference in effectiveness is just incredible.

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Agreed. We use Kanban and are very happy. We used to not do any estimates but have voices from others asking for them to do better planning of marketing and sales activities. I understand where they are coming from but so far it's mostly guessing

So: Do you do estimation in Kanban and if so, how?

You don’t do estimation without prioritization. As a consultant, my default way of working is kanban, often setup on Trello. Once I deconstructed the project into features, the first thing I do with the client is arrange them by priority and arrange them into sets for releases.

If sales and marketing need to do planning, then they need to tell what they want to push back to the backlog so that the feature they want are on time.

We do that already, yeah. But they'd like estimates on a lot of issues so they can prioritize better. I believe it's a waste of time though. There is no good solution for this I believe.

I think generally you should be able to break some feature up into a series of very small tasks that can be estimated. So you may not be able to estimate an end to end feature accurately but you should be able to give rough ETAs for when different functionality will start to trickle in

This is what we've done of late. Massive improvement. Much lower time commitment and we get a good (enough...not perfect) view of the metrics we really need to focus on.

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