Most scaled delivery methods involve slicing up a programme of work into fixed feature teams, with hidden dependencies, inflated estimates, and Gantt charts masquerading as a product backlog.
Demand-Led Planning1 is a quarterly planning workshop that takes a different approach, with the assumption that you do not need ‘stable, long-lived feature teams’! Instead, our experience (and subsequent research) tells us that the forming, storming, norming and performing of new teams can happen in hours or days rather than taking weeks or months.
We start by making all the demand visible for the quarter. Not only product development activities like shipping feature and researching customer behaviour, but all of the day-to-day work of running a business: shipping products, servicing customers, maintaining systems, running reports, responding to outages, as well as all the work that changes and improves the system of work itself: process improvement, automation and tooling, learning and development, hiring and on-boarding.
Different stakeholders ‘pitch’ the various demand items for the quarter and the programme team—anything from 20 to 200 people—self-organizes into the teams and structures that will meet this demand.
People self-organize around the work; some are ‘bumblebees’ who will float between teams
This exercise takes 1-2 days, depending on the size of the programme and the maturity of the team. The impact on the programme and its people is profound. People feel more engaged with their work; they understand how their work contributes to the programme’s mission; they feel they have agency to decide what they will work on, where they can contribute, learn or both. Throughput of work measurably improves, often by more than double, without compromising quality, as the team is able to focus on what matters.
Note: Most programme teams are not ready to ‘just start’ with demand-led planning. Instead, we start by exploring all the reasons why ‘it will not work here’—and address these one at a time until the team is ready to give it a try.
has over a decade of experience implementing demand-led planning in retail giants, regulated environments like banks, hedge funds and trading firms, traditional telcos, and many other environments.
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Daniel gave a talk about Demand-Led Planning at Craft Conference 2025 ↩︎