I’ve been working at a “startup” for the past 18 months and was recently promoted to Tech Lead after my boss left. Up until mid-year the development team has always focused on our company’s core product offerings. As these were internal projects, the timelines themselves were rather lax. Since mid-year however, we've started taking on more client projects. This is great for the company, but everyone on the Tech team has become really stressed out with this new way of working. We’re having a hard time balancing all these promised deliverables and maintaining our existing infrastructure and core products. From our perspective, the issue arises from the Sales department promising deliverables without any input from us regarding existing deadlines and resource availability (i.e. developer time). We understand that taking on new projects helps the bottom line, but with more projects on our plate, we’ve started taking shortcuts and scrambling to deliver everything within time.

When we were working solely on internal products, we were somewhat following Scrum and developed a really nice rhythm. With these unplanned deadlines Sales is giving us, we’ve faltered and lost that rhythm. Just to be clear, we’ve yet to encounter a project that hasn’t been technically feasible, it’s just a lack of resources or conflict with existing timelines. With all these projects and deadlines, the quality of _all_ our output has noticeably declined. Upper management is concerned about this and we were recently asked “how (without increasing headcount) we can get a better handle on all these projects?” to which I’ve yet to find an adequate answer (my first suggestion would be to hire more people!). We have 4 people (including myself) working as full time devs.

In light of that question, I’ve been thinking that perhaps more “antiquated” (</s>) project management techniques such as completing full URS and FRS documents and then feeding those into Gantt charts would help us come up with a long term roadmaps of projects that we could share with Sales, but this idea hasn’t gained traction with anyone including my team and Sales.

I’m really not sure how to move forward and ensure we can meet all these incoming project deadlines while maintaining quality and was hoping those who’ve worked in similar roles could provide some insights or tips on managing this issue.