Good pain

I was reading Rajesh Setty's blog this morning and noticed a Tweet he had posted that said "The pain of discipline is now, the pain of regret is later." There was a related tweet from someone else that said the pain of regret is always greater than the pain of discipline.

One of the things that I noticed in my first year or so as a Scrum product owner was that simultaneously the best and worst part of the process, at least for me, was the moment in the planning session when I drag items from the backlog into the new sprint.

Inevitably, I always wanted to try and squeeze one or two more items into the sprint than would fit. I had to acknowledge that we couldn't do all the work that I had hoped we would be able to (worst part). And having acknowledged that reality, then I would work with the team and stakeholders to make hard decisions about what we were NOT going to work on. We would end up with an amount of work that we were comfortable we could finish (best part).

In this moment, I was experiencing the pain of discipline.