Minimizing slack is not a good long term strategy

TheViz has a post on slack, the concept not the app. Slack as applied to organizations and teams is interesting. In bad organizations managers act to minimize the amount of slack a given team has. If a team of engineers is delivering features comfortably, pile on more tickets or request more features. This is often wrong. It’s wrong because slack is important. Slack is important because teams who have slack have time to make improvements. To come up with better tooling. To migrate to new architectures as needs and scale changes. To improve their internal processes. Not all teams do this naturally but well-led, high performing teams do.