The purpose of a company is to make money. Even if you hate shareholders (like for example your own 401k) and think invested capital deserves zero return, making money is still what allows the company to pay your salary.
Most companies do this by selling things to customers, whether services or products.
If you're building software for a specific customer, they'll want to know when then can start using it.
If you're building something for retail, marketing will want to know what release date to advertise.
These are the mind of things that management uses those reports for. Saying that actually customers don't need to be able to make plans, or marketing doesn't need to be able to advertise, is effectively saying that your employer doesn't need to make any money.
Which is quite a silly thing to say, at least if you recognize that devs don't exist in isolation and maybe even aren't the center of the universe.
> Saying that actually customers don't need to be able to make plans, or marketing doesn't need to be able to advertise, is effectively saying that your employer doesn't need to make any money.
That's not at all what I said. I said, if you choose to make management more efficient to the detriment of the people making the thing your company sells, you've made a bad choice. Bad managers like story points because it usually doesn't hurt their heads too much to add and compare scalar values. But a story point doesn't come anywhere close to representing the complexity of building any product. I've had one or two bad managers who wanted to make all things subservient to their precious Excel file. The productivity of that team (when the manager and story points process were introduced) plummeted and the entire team quit within a month of each other leaving.
The best managers I have had have worked by discussing customer and business needs with engineering and walking away with a richer picture of the tasks involved and an estimated timeline. It is very hard work to do this—it usually takes someone with a little knowledge of how software engineering works. I've had good product managers like this and I've been able to deliver some of the highest-value code I've written (measured strictly monetarily) thanks to managers who took a rich, nuanced view of the process.
I am not advocating for no management or no planning. I am advocating for management not requiring over-simplified metrics because it makes their life easier. Management does not exist to make its own tasks easier. It exists to make it easier for the people making the product to build the right thing at the right time and sell it. You can make plans without story points.
Most companies do this by selling things to customers, whether services or products.
If you're building software for a specific customer, they'll want to know when then can start using it.
If you're building something for retail, marketing will want to know what release date to advertise.
These are the mind of things that management uses those reports for. Saying that actually customers don't need to be able to make plans, or marketing doesn't need to be able to advertise, is effectively saying that your employer doesn't need to make any money.
Which is quite a silly thing to say, at least if you recognize that devs don't exist in isolation and maybe even aren't the center of the universe.