Ryan Singer: preference

Transcript context

…One of the core elements of this, and I want to confirm is that you can pick and choose these things into your team. You don't need to do this wholesale, correct? You don't need to do any of it. So, this is where it helps to look at what's going wrong and what are we trying to fix? And then what do I want to bring into this, right? And usually, what I notice is that people, they like to start sometimes with, "Oh, I want to give the team, let's say six weeks and I want to give the team more latitude or let's say more creative freedom, that they're going to be responsible in this six weeks to figure out how to make it happen." And usually a lot of the drive for that is, "I'm getting tired of having so many meetings and rituals and things that are not actually working on the problem and doing the work." I mean, especially scrum teams, they often complain about that. So, what they sometimes see in this is like, "Oh, I love this idea that the team is just going to be cooking for six weeks and they're not going to, we're going to meet as needed and we're going to workshop things, but we're not going to be busy with all these rituals all the time," right? Now, the thing that's tricky is that if you want that reality of the team happily buzzing and humming like some happy bee colony for this six weeks, they need to have a lot more clarity around what's the thing that we're solving, right? And so when we start working backward from that, then what we see is that, "Oh, well, if we don't shape better, then the team isn't going to have the clarity that they need to take over that responsibility, so they can make choices and make decisions and make trade offs so that they can get to the end of this thing." And the worst is that sometimes see cases where people are like, "Okay, we're doing Shape Up. So, you guys are going to build the newsletter builder, okay? But you only get six weeks to do it. So use your fixed time, vary your scope and enjoy your responsibility." You know what I mean? Which is just cruel, right? Because I think I'll quote Bob Moesta, who's been on your show a couple times, "You can't put 10 pounds of crap in a five pound bag. " So, it's a high academic statement and we can't just take any project, no matter how giant it is, and then throw it at a team and say, "Figure it out and ship something meaningful in six weeks by cutting away scope," right? So, it starts to raise questions about how do we actually decide together what this project is? Do we actually have clarity around what the idea is and what we're going to build? Let me follow up on a couple of the elements. So appetites, I think for any product manager, engineer, designer, anyone that has experienced, "Okay, we estimate this landing page is going to take a couple of weeks. Great, let's work on it," and then it ends up being six weeks can understand why this makes sense. It's just like, "This landing page is not that important to us. Let us just say we will commit two weeks to it. We'll do as much as we can in two weeks and then we move on. And scope is not allowed to go beyond that." Makes total sense. This just makes so much sense as you listen to this, especially for people that have... So much sense as you listen to this, especially for people that have just fallen into the problems of estimates not being accurate. Then there's a six-week element and the key there is your, and this is counter to maybe two-week sprints like Scrum, is that kind of the where this comes?…

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