Good communication between product manager and team, between value appraisal and product development, leads to success. It helps you build the right thing at the right time. When the Product Owner and Development Team communicate well, the Product Owner can forecast feature delivery dates with a statistical likelihood. It promotes great architectures. The Development Team can build, but not over-build, a resilient architecture suitable for likely future needs.
I developed the Forecast Horizon metric to measure team communication. Forecast Horizon is the sum of work estimates from the top of the backlog through the first unestimated Product Backlog Item. Since many Product Owner put unestimated Backlog Items at the top of a Backlog, you may choose to skip unestimated backlog items that have been modified since the last Sprint Planning or Grooming meeting. Forecast Horizon can be expressed in team-time, by dividing by a recent average velocity and multiplying by sprint duration. In my work, I usually talk about Forecast Horizon in weeks.
