#12 - T-shirt Size, How long will it take to deliver?
How long will it take to deliver?
Once I have crafted the Vision Statement as outlined in my previous post:
I move onto the 12th and last area, the T-Shirt Sizing.
The T-Shirt Size area is where the Agile Data Team provides a preliminary guesstimate of the time and effort required to deliver the Information Product.
T-Shirt sizes (Small, Medium, Large etc.) provide a way of conveying relative sizing for the delivery time-frame and effort across multiple Information Products.
When deciding the order in which Information Products should be delivered, value should be the primary driver of prioritisation, not the effort required to design, build, and deploy them.
Stakeholders should focus on the Vision and Action/Outcome areas of the Canvas to determine the next most valuable Information Product to deliver.
However, experience shows stakeholders often want a sense of how long something will take before making a decision on priority.
To balance these behaviours, we use T-Shirt Sizing as a quick, low-effort way to estimate the relative complexity of delivering an Information Product.
T-Shirt Sizing follows a simple pattern, assigning Small (S), Medium (M), Large (L) labels to reflect the anticipated level of effort and complexity. This broad classification provides a directional sense of effort without spending excessive time on detailed estimation.
Experience shows that humans are notoriously bad at effort estimation. If left unchecked, data teams can spend too much time debating estimates rather than delivering value. That’s why T-Shirt Sizing is deliberately quick, approximate, and designed to prevent over-analysis.
The goal is not to produce a precise estimation of effort but to offer a practical comparison of effort across multiple Information Products.
Stakeholders can use these relative estimates as an input into prioritisation, ensuring that the most valuable Information Product is delivered next, rather than simply selecting the one that appears the quickest to deliver.