UrgencyCascade

Urgency cascade is GavinMorgan's term for the situation where, the farther down the chain of command a work item is pushed, the more urgent it appears to be.

GavinMorgan theorizes that this happens because everyone pads their estimates. The customer says "it would be nice if we could have this feature someday". The product owner puts it on a roadmap; the senior VP of product management puts a date on it; every middle manager through which the feature request goes then puts another layer of padding on their estimate. By the time the feature request gets to the programmers, the entire budget has been blown on padding, and the feature appears to be needed urgently by the end of the week or else.

The more levels of hierarchy you have in an organization, the worse this effect gets. The less transparent and honest conversations are, the worse it gets.