We’re all obsessed with velocity, story points, and shipping faster. But what if the biggest blocker on your team isn’t technical debt or scope creep, but a hidden force: excessive cognitive load?
The concept, from the book Team Topologies, refers to the total mental effort a team needs to get their work done. When a team is constantly wrestling with complex tools, tangled dependencies, or ambiguous requirements (Extraneous load), they have less mental capacity for the actual problem-solving and innovation we need from them (Germane load).
As PMs, we often see ourselves as the source of requirements, pushing features onto the roadmap. But our role should also be to act as a shield. Are we inadvertently increasing cognitive load by creating sprawling epics or ignoring the complexity of the existing architecture? True cross-functional collaboration means sharing the responsibility for managing this load.
Streamlining our own processes is a critical part of the solution. Consolidating user feedback and insights in one place, for example, reduces the mental overhead of switching between countless documents and tools. At https://leera.io, we’re focused on creating that central hub to make connecting insights to action as seamless as possible, freeing up brainpower for what matters.
How do you actively measure or manage team cognitive load in your planning and roadmapping process? What’s one change you’ve made that had a positive impact?