> Scrum story points are supposed to reflect end user benefits.
That’s not my understanding at all. In our org, that’s the role of backlog priorities. Story points are the cost to get there, and are explicitly a tool to estimate relative amounts of effort involved.
If tech debt is to be incurred, it is expected that engineers negotiate that, and that other estimates will change as a result (and/or other tasks be created to track that debt). But then, nearly 100% of the managers in our org are, themselves, engineers or SMEs in the field they are managing, so they have realistic goals and understanding of the sausage-making process. What you’re describing really does sound more to me like a management problem than a process problem.
That’s not my understanding at all. In our org, that’s the role of backlog priorities. Story points are the cost to get there, and are explicitly a tool to estimate relative amounts of effort involved.
If tech debt is to be incurred, it is expected that engineers negotiate that, and that other estimates will change as a result (and/or other tasks be created to track that debt). But then, nearly 100% of the managers in our org are, themselves, engineers or SMEs in the field they are managing, so they have realistic goals and understanding of the sausage-making process. What you’re describing really does sound more to me like a management problem than a process problem.