Something I've become increasingly convinced of is that many missed commitments don't begin in delivery, but rather much earlier.
My best guess would be a roadmap meeting or a planning session. Often, it happens in the middle of a perfectly reasonable conversation while we are aiming to build something genuinely useful. What we may not notice is that the feature slowly grows until it becomes increasingly difficult to split.
And so, by the time the work reaches a delivery team, many of the conditions for the future delay have already been created.

From flow point of view, one of the worst statements you can make is “at least everything is being progressed”, yet I’ve heard that so many times from both inexperienced delivery leads and product people alike.

In my previous article, I explored feature ageing and discussed why it can be a useful signal for product managers. When you observe the ageing of features over time, you may notice a strange phenomenon with some late deliveries.

If you work in software product delivery I think you might recognise this slightly uncomfortable situation I’ve noticed.