How to calculate team capacity for a sprint in Linear
Most sprint planning starts with a backlog and ends with a gut-feel commitment. That's how teams end up overcommitted every cycle. Capacity planning flips…
The hidden tax of context switching on engineering throughput
Every capacity model assumes time is fungible. It isn't. Three hours split across three tasks isn't the same as three hours on one. The difference is context…
Jira vs Linear for capacity planning
If you run sprint planning in Jira, you probably have capacity tools — maybe clunky, maybe a paid plugin, but they exist. If you moved to Linear and tried to…
Linear sprint planning: a practical checklist
Sprint planning goes sideways for the same reasons at every team: no capacity model, estimates that drift mid-cycle, no clear cycle goal, carry-over that…
PTO, on-call, and meetings: what's really left of your sprint
If you plan a 10-day cycle for 6 engineers, it looks like 60 engineer-days on the board. It isn't.
Velocity is a bad proxy for capacity — measure this instead
Velocity is the most-cited metric in agile, and one of the worst for planning next cycle's capacity. It's not that velocity is useless — it's that teams…
Why your team overcommits every sprint (and it's not optimism)
The usual explanation for overcommitment is "engineers are optimistic." That's not wrong, but it's not the root cause. Blaming optimism makes overcommitment…