They use it to fix bugs, explore new ideas, or try out new technical possibilities. After working hard to ship their six-week projects, they enjoy having time that’s under their control.
This is a period with no scheduled work where we can breathe, meet as needed, and consider what to do next.ĭuring cool-down, programmers and designers on project teams are free to work on whatever they want. Therefore, after each six-week cycle, we schedule two weeks for cool-down. The end of a cycle is the worst time to meet and plan because everybody is too busy finishing projects and making last-minute decisions in order to ship on time. If we were to run six-week cycles back to back, there wouldn’t be any time to breathe and think about what’s next. Six weeks is long enough to finish something meaningful and still short enough to see the end from the beginning. If the deadline is too distant and abstract at the start, teams will naturally wander and use time inefficiently until the deadline starts to get closer and feel real.Īfter years of experimentation we arrived at six weeks. People need to feel the deadline looming in order to make trade-offs.
At the same time, cycles need to be short enough to see the end from the beginning.
We wanted a cycle that would be long enough to finish a whole project, start to end. The amount of work you get out of two weeks isn’t worth the collective hours around the table to “sprint plan” or the opportunity cost of breaking everyone’s momentum to re-group. Worse than that, two-week cycles are extremely costly due to the planning overhead. We learned that two weeks is too short to get anything meaningful done. Some companies use two-week cycles (aka “sprints”). A cycle gives us a standard project size both for shaping and scheduling. Working in cycles drastically simplifies this problem. When people are available at different times due to overlapping projects, project planning turns into a frustrating game of Calendar Tetris. Six-week cyclesĬommitting time and people is difficult if we can’t easily determine who’s available and for how long. Now that we have some good potential bets in the form of pitches, it’s time to make decisions about which projects to schedule.
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