By Marty Cagan · svpg.com · LinkedIn
Marty Cagan argues that milestone swarming, where most or all of a dedicated product team (or a virtual team drawn from several teams for an initiative) focuses together on one significant business milestone, can speed delivery and improve quality. He frames milestones around business results rather than dates, and notes that swarming is mainly a delivery-track activity, with product managers and designers doing their discovery work beforehand. Benefits include speed from focused effort, quality from many reviewers, cross-training, and morale. The technique matters most for cross-team initiatives, where it makes valuable but coordination-heavy work more feasible instead of something teams avoid.
01Key takeaways
- Judge milestones by the business result they deliver, not by the date they are due.
- Reserve swarming for truly important milestones rather than every small task.
- Do the bulk of product and design discovery before work enters the delivery backlog so the swarm can focus on building.
- Use multiple reviewers on the same work to raise quality as it is being built.
- For cross-team initiatives, assemble a temporary virtual team and co-locate it when distance hinders coordination.
- Make swarming a regular practice for key initiative milestones instead of a one-off experiment.
02Key sections
- Defining milestones
- A milestone is a meaningful business achievement, such as a KPI improvement or a validated test result, and its value lies in the outcome rather than the deadline. Some milestones belong to one team, while others require coordinated work across several teams.
- What swarming is
- Swarming extends pair programming by having a whole team, or most of it, work on one backlog item together until it is truly done. Variations include shared-screen group work and parallel threads, and it is known by several names, including mob programming.
- Where swarming fits in dual-track Agile
- Swarming is primarily a delivery-track practice involving developers and test automation engineers. Product managers and designers stay available for questions, but most of their work should be finished during discovery before items reach the backlog.
- Benefits of swarming
- Focused effort speeds delivery, many reviewers improve quality, and people learn from each other's skills and code knowledge. Accomplishing something meaningful together also raises team morale.
- Swarming for initiatives
- Cross-team initiatives can be swarmed by assembling a temporary virtual team from several product teams, sometimes co-locating them. This builds cross-team relationships and makes high-value but dependency-heavy work practical rather than avoided.
03From the post
“A partnership dedicated to teaching best practices to product teams and product leaders”
04Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.