Why I’m Teaching Twitch to Predict the Future

I've been using 80% estimates at Twitch for most of this year. 80% estimates are estimates you expect to beat 80% of the time. We're integrating them into this years annual planning progress, so that all our dates and cost estimates mean the same thing.

I believe they’ll immediately make our estimates 50% better at setting expectations. A standard estimate could be an optimistic goal (30%), likely (50%), conservative (80%), or sandbagged (95%).

And it’s fast. It only takes me 2 minutes to get an engineer to turn a normal estimate into an 80% estimate for the first time (whereas it takes me 30 minutes to help pm’s make their first predictions).