We’ve been working in new product mode for over a year. As we return to more typical cycle work, we’re revisiting what a typical cycle means.
As we all know, product development has changed substantially. Shape Up is designed to make the best use of a limited resource: programmer time. Six-week cycles, appetites, scope hammering, and the circuit breaker are constraints that make it possible to ship high-quality work, faster. Now, a substantial feature that may have taken four weeks, with a real risk of expanding to six, can be shipped in one. Building is no longer the primary bottle-neck.
Like many of you, we’re experimenting with different approaches to find what works best in this new world. We’ll share what we learn along the way. Please do the same, I’d love to hear from you.
One thing we’ve changed is cool-down is now tune-up.
Three things sparked the change.
Cool-down increasingly sounded a little off, like we were sprinting and it's time to shift to a lower gear. But we work calmly, thoughtfully, and asynchronously. People own their calendars, meetings are few, and the pace is steady.
Second, cool-down was vague about what the time was for. Yes, it’s designed for self-directed work, but what does that mean?
Tune-up is time set aside for tightening things up, fixing bugs, removing long-standing annoyances, refactoring, and sanding down rough edges. Making our products better in small, meaningful ways. That might include tuning up our dev and AI tooling.
That’s not terribly different from how cool-downs were used, but giving it a clear purpose clarifies what fits and what doesn’t. Everyone is working toward the same goal.
Finally, tune-up is one week instead of two. We've found that two weeks is long enough to start to lose momentum. It's also a long time when you consider what can be built in two or three days now. I know many teams that use Shape Up do one week already.
Why have time between cycles at all? It provides margin to ship and announce things. A cycle that starts the Monday after another ends means you're often not starting with a clean slate. We also plan the next cycle, and write heartbeats and kickoffs.
Plus, time for self-directed work is a good thing. Everyone chooses what to work on during tune-up. We have a bunch of ideas, of course, but this is a chance to fix and polish things you personally run into day after day.
We’re doing our first tune-up right now and our products are getting better every day. Fewer paper cuts and inconsistencies and just a better experience in a bunch of small ways. We’ll try it for a few cycles and see how it goes.
As we all know, product development has changed substantially. Shape Up is designed to make the best use of a limited resource: programmer time. Six-week cycles, appetites, scope hammering, and the circuit breaker are constraints that make it possible to ship high-quality work, faster. Now, a substantial feature that may have taken four weeks, with a real risk of expanding to six, can be shipped in one. Building is no longer the primary bottle-neck.
Like many of you, we’re experimenting with different approaches to find what works best in this new world. We’ll share what we learn along the way. Please do the same, I’d love to hear from you.
One thing we’ve changed is cool-down is now tune-up.
Three things sparked the change.
Cool-down increasingly sounded a little off, like we were sprinting and it's time to shift to a lower gear. But we work calmly, thoughtfully, and asynchronously. People own their calendars, meetings are few, and the pace is steady.
Second, cool-down was vague about what the time was for. Yes, it’s designed for self-directed work, but what does that mean?
Tune-up is time set aside for tightening things up, fixing bugs, removing long-standing annoyances, refactoring, and sanding down rough edges. Making our products better in small, meaningful ways. That might include tuning up our dev and AI tooling.
That’s not terribly different from how cool-downs were used, but giving it a clear purpose clarifies what fits and what doesn’t. Everyone is working toward the same goal.
Finally, tune-up is one week instead of two. We've found that two weeks is long enough to start to lose momentum. It's also a long time when you consider what can be built in two or three days now. I know many teams that use Shape Up do one week already.
Why have time between cycles at all? It provides margin to ship and announce things. A cycle that starts the Monday after another ends means you're often not starting with a clean slate. We also plan the next cycle, and write heartbeats and kickoffs.
Plus, time for self-directed work is a good thing. Everyone chooses what to work on during tune-up. We have a bunch of ideas, of course, but this is a chance to fix and polish things you personally run into day after day.
We’re doing our first tune-up right now and our products are getting better every day. Fewer paper cuts and inconsistencies and just a better experience in a bunch of small ways. We’ll try it for a few cycles and see how it goes.