Ryan Singer, head of Strategy at Basecamp, in his book Shape Up, describes an interesting approach for the development process used by Basecamp that focuses on shipping work that matters.
Below you can find my favorite takeaways:
- Use appetite not estimation. Appetite says how much time you want to invest in the given idea. It prevents a situation that you spend plenty of time on the feature that improves your product only a little bit.
- Default response to any idea should be "Interesting, maybe someday". Ideas are cheap.
- Backlogs are big weight we don't need to carry. Reviewing items in a huge backlog it's a waste of time. A huge backlog demotivates a team that feels constantly behind the schedule.
- Define cool down periods in your project. If you are doing scrum, don't organize Sprint review and Sprint planning back-to-back.
- No automatic extension of unfinished work. If it took more than you defined it as an appetite maybe it is not worth doing? This is also an additional stimulus for your team, to decide about priorities, what is a must-have and what is only nice-to-have if their work can be completely abandoned.
- Assign projects, not tasks. Talented people don’t like being treated like “code monkeys” or ticket takers.
- What to build first: something core, small, novel.
- Use the hill diagram to visualize your progress. There’s the uphill phase of figuring out what our approach is and what we’re going to do. Then, once we can see all the work involved, there’s the downhill phase of execution. Use gut feeling instead of concrete numbers like a number of finished tasks.
- When it is good enough and you can finish a project? Compare to the baseline, initial state, not to the ideal solution to avoid frustration.
Shape Up book is available for free at https://basecamp.com/shapeup
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