Every quarter we grade unplanned work like it’s a mistake. What if it’s just the job?
The retro slide had two numbers on it. Unplanned work: thirty percent last quarter, forty percent this one. Next to it, a line for next quarter, how much capacity to hold open for the same thing happening again. Nobody could say what that number should be with any confidence, if we knew in advance how much unplanned work was coming, it wouldn’t be unplanned, but holding zero capacity for it, after two straight quarters trending up, wasn’t really an option either.
The trend line matters more than either number alone. It’s not that the team got worse at planning. It’s that whatever’s generating the unplanned work, shifting priorities, a business figuring itself out in real time, isn’t slowing down. An ER’s caseload isn’t a reflection of the ER. It’s a reflection of what’s happening in the city. Ours was telling us something about the business, not about us.
Then someone on the product side pointed at something else on the list entirely, something planned, already prioritized, already committed to.
Where are the requirements for this?
That was a fair question, aimed at the wrong kind of item for it to sting the way it usually does. The work itself wasn’t a walk-in. It had been on the roadmap for weeks. Nobody had done the diagnostic work of figuring out what it actually was before it landed there, someone with authority had said it mattered, and that had substituted for a spec. The requirements gap was real. It just wasn’t the same gap as the number climbing one line above it.
I’ve watched this exact scene play out more than once, in multiple organizations, two different problems getting read as one complaint.
The List Already Works
Every quarter we build the same artifact: must have, should have, nice to have. We present it like a plan. Stakeholders nod, occasionally push on something they care about, and by and large the list ends up matching what actually needed to happen. That part isn’t broken. We’re good at knowing what matters.
What we don’t have is the thing the list implies we have: a clean chain from requirements to prioritization to execution. Nobody says “this isn’t on the list because we don’t have requirements yet.” Nobody says “this item is already at risk because the requirements aren’t there.” We skip straight to the list, because we already know, more or less, what needs to get done.
Two Different Problems Wearing the Same Complaint
“We don’t have requirements” gets used to describe two different things, and they’re not the same failure.
One is the true walk-in: work that shows up mid-quarter, unscheduled, because something broke or something new became urgent. Nobody could have scoped it in advance. That’s the situation an ER doctor treats without taking a full history first, not negligence, just the job.
The other is work that’s already on the list, already prioritized, already committed to, and still has no real definition of what it actually is. Someone with authority said this matters, so it went on the roadmap, and the team started building before anyone had done the diagnostic work of figuring out what “this” means. That’s closer to a case getting booked into tomorrow’s OR schedule off a referral: the surgeon commits to the slot because the person making the call is trusted, not because the workup happened. The team ends up defining the work in real time, mid-procedure, because the priority call substituted for the specification.
Both get called “no requirements.” Only one of them is actually about triage.
Unplanned Work Needs Triage, Not Negligence
For the true walk-ins, the skill isn’t complete information, it’s making the right call fast, with what you have, and adjusting as more comes in. That’s a real discipline. It has its own competence, its own way of being good or bad at the job, and it looks nothing like a GP’s.
What that competence actually looks like, concretely: someone with the authority to make a fast call without waiting for a full workup. A shared, fast way to size up what’s in front of you, more like a severity check than a requirements doc. Capacity that’s planned for the unplanned, a real percentage of the quarter held open, not treated as slack that shouldn’t exist. Retros that ask whether the call was good, given what was known at the time, instead of asking why the paperwork wasn’t done.
The scheduled-but-unspecified work needs a different fix, and it has to happen earlier. By the time the case is booked into the OR schedule, it’s too late to ask what the surgery actually involves, the slot is already committed. The fix isn’t a better question mid-procedure, it’s a checkpoint before the slot gets booked: whoever has the authority to say “this is a priority” also owns getting a rough diagnostic done before it lands on the list, not a full requirements doc, just enough to know what kind of case this is. If that checkpoint doesn’t exist, the priority call itself becomes the only gate the work has to pass, and everything downstream inherits however vague that call was. That sits with whoever controls the list, not with whoever ends up doing the work. In a lot of orgs that’s not a formal role, it’s whichever PM said yes fastest, or whoever has five other titles and this happens to be one of them. The fix doesn’t require a new position. It requires that whoever already holds that yes also holds the job of asking one more question before it counts as a priority.
The Dance
Naming which one you are doesn’t mean sitting still inside it. Two different problems, two different responses.
The true unplanned work isn’t a visibility failure to be coached out of the business. The business doesn’t know either. That’s the actual condition, not a lack of effort on their part. Something being on the list at all is already the earliest signal they have, the moment they know enough to say “this is coming” is usually the moment it lands on the roadmap, half-formed. There isn’t a version where they see further ahead and hand you a cleaner list. The lever here isn’t upstream, it’s capacity: plan for the volume, not the shape. Hold room open on purpose, sized to the trend, not to some target number that assumes the volatility will politely go down because a slide says it should.
The planned-but-unspecified work is the one place a real lever exists, because it’s already inside your process, not out in a business that doesn’t know yet. If something’s on the list and nobody can say what it actually is, that’s grounds to question whether it belongs there, or belongs there yet. Being on the list because someone with authority wants it isn’t the same as being ready to build. Pushing back on that isn’t obstruction. It’s the checkpoint from the previous section, just applied with some teeth.
That’s the actual work, every quarter: not eliminating unplanned work, since that’s asking the business to know something it doesn’t, but sizing capacity to absorb it honestly, and refusing to let priority substitute for a spec on the things that are supposed to be plannable. One problem gets absorbed. The other gets pushed back on. Different tools, because they’re not the same problem.
Nobody’s Picked
Here’s what actually demoralizes a team: not being an ER. Being asked to run like one and graded like a GP, quarter after quarter, without anyone in leadership saying out loud which one we’re supposed to be, or admitting that some of our work is genuinely one and some is genuinely the other.
A GP shop is a legitimate way to run this work. Slower cycles, real requirements gathering up front, patience from stakeholders while that happens, a willingness to say no to the mid-quarter fire because it doesn’t fit the plan. An ER shop is also legitimate, with its own version of rigor, just a different one. What isn’t legitimate is asking for ER speed with GP process, or booking OR slots off referral and then grading the surgeon on intake paperwork.
Nobody’s picked. And I don’t think that’s neutral, it’s what keeps the frustration alive. Not deciding doesn’t preserve flexibility, it just means everyone keeps operating on their own private guess about which one we are, and gets penalized whenever that guess doesn’t match what leadership grades against. Ambiguity isn’t neutral ground, it’s a cost, paid every quarter, by whoever’s closest to the work.
Agreement is what changes it. Not agreement in the sense of everyone liking the answer, agreement in the sense of a decision that’s been said out loud, that people are empowered to act on. Once a team knows which one it is, it stops guessing and starts building the things that make that model good: someone with the authority to call it, a checkpoint before priority turns into commitment, a retro that grades the call instead of the paperwork. None of that is possible while the question’s still being avoided.
I’ve worked in both kinds of shops. The difference was never which one was better. It was whether anyone had actually decided.