Don't Review Stakeholder Requests Every Day
Twice a week is enough
My team reviewed stakeholder requests constantly.
Checking Slack channels, monitoring our intake form, and moving tickets around systems. Sometimes we did this multiple times a day.
To add to the pain, everyone operated in different ways. Some people picked up a ticket and worked on it immediately. Some people waited for someone else to do it.
It felt chaotic.
That is, until we started doing one thing.
Reviewing ad hoc requests on a schedule.
The problem with constant monitoring
Monitoring intake requests constantly is painful.
The context switching kills your productivity.
You switch from deep work to the shallow work of checking intake requests and you fracture your time and attention. You don't make progress on your big goals and you negatively impact your team members.
If team members are picking up requests in an ad hoc way, the other team members don't know what's been reviewed or not. If random requests are worked on immediately, more important work gets left on the backlog.
This haphazard process keeps everyone's hair on fire.
The solution: The Twice-a-week System
Instead of constant monitoring, this is what my team switched to:
- Allow stakeholders to make requests at any time
- Review requests as a team twice a week
- Triage requirements
- Prioritize
The important step is the second one: reviewing requests twice a week.
It's the step that brought my team clarity and control.
Benefits of reviewing twice a week
Reviewing requests on a defined cadence transforms how you work.
- Protects deep work time
- Stakeholders have predictability
- Zero context switching to check intakes
- No one immediately works on low-value tasks
- Every team member is aware of incoming requests
- Creates time to determine how the team will gather requirements
Replacing context switching with deep work time is the fastest way to make a bigger impact.
You no longer fight the administrative overhead; you time-box the overhead so you have more time for high-impact work.
Don't allow your stakeholders to tap you on the shoulder everyday.
Build a predictable system that protects your time and gives your stakeholders what they want.