Managing internal pressure for unplanned feature additions requires balancing flexibility with discipline. Start by assessing the feature’s impact on project goals and timelines. Clearly communicate priorities, reinforcing how deviations can disrupt overall progress. Encourage a structured process for evaluating changes, ensuring they align with business objectives. Document new ideas for future consideration, keeping innovation alive without compromising current commitments. Engage stakeholders to validate urgency and necessity. Transparently discuss trade-offs, ensuring informed decision-making. This approach maintains focus while fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

This is not a hard question. Developers should be able to create tasks in the backlog, but not every backlog item will get promoted to "todo" immediately and some may require campaigning to the product owner / team. Also, rather than monkey with sizing, I just insist all tasks are less than 4 hours. In this way, developers can complete at least 2 tasks per day. If there's extra time in a day, pull from the kanban, go home early or feel free to develop your new ideas in a separate branch.

Managing internal pressure situation sometimes is more difficult than external pressure. Buffer-- Consider building flexibility in time and budget. Such a planning could help in last minute pressure situations. Boundaries-- last minute chnage should have a clear categories, is it really needed, is it gone impact longer term or short term, its good to have or must have. Transparent communication -- Impact on time lines, budget, other commitments, and quality measure. Impact assessment-- Must analyze impact of these changes on current framework. SDLC -- should be very clear about quality parameters there should not be bypass to processes.

Managing unplanned feature requests requires a balance between innovation and focus. I first evaluate the impact on the project’s scope, timeline, and goals. If it aligns, we adjust priorities; if not, I document it for future iterations. Clear communication with the team about the roadmap’s importance ensures we stay on track while keeping creativity alive.

Something I’ve found helpful is to give engineers as much context in the “why” behind the roadmap as possible, when we understand “why” we are much more likely to have a productive conversation around “why not” when it comes to unplanned work. Second is keep your plans short, the further out you plan the more outdated your plans get and answering the “why not” gets harder and harder. I try to only make “hard plans” for 2 sequential features at a time (when the business permits), giving the team lots of room to stay nimble, for pivots and injecting “unplanned” work into the plan. As one feature ends, the next is ready and we prioritize and plan for the next one.