We are an engineer team of 10 people working in a startup.<p>Up to now, we organized our work in iterations of 2 weeks.<p>Before each iteration starts:<p>1. Product team will assign stories for the next iteration.
2. Engineering team leads will break down stories into technical tasks.
3. After technical tasks have been created, we use [planning poker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker) to assign points to each development task.<p>For the most part, this works fine. However, we have a few emerging problems:<p>* Breaking down stories into technical tasks is taking a long-time. Team lead will spend about 16 hours.
* Once broken down, tasks do not necessarily align with what actually needs to be developed, i.e. as developers start working, they realize more optimal ways to break down tasks.
* As a startup, we have a lot of tasks that are added mid-iteration. This scope creep accounts anywhere from 10-30% of each iteration.<p>As a result, engineers proposed that we abandon iterations and story points in general.<p>* All stories would be organized in a single priority list.
* Development tasks would be created ad-hoc to match what is being developed.
* We would stop tracking engineer velocity using story points.<p>My hesitation with this proposal is that without knowing team's velocity, we cannot plan when features will be completed.<p>I am curious to know how engineering work is organized in your organization, if there are similarities to how we organize / consider organizing work, and pros / cons you have observed.