Aspect Ratio
Sean Moore
Two weeks, too few.
Two weeks. Two weeks?
When I was first introduced to the scrum method and the product sprints that came along with it, that was my first reaction. Coming from an industry that has a timescale of years to market, two weeks for a product update and launch was more than just a blink of an eye; how could anything get accomplished.
Then I spent those two weeks updating and shipping a product. There is a surreal intensity of focus when you know there is a two week deadline to getting every last piece of functionality complete. But I also find myself throwing out perfectly good ideas because they couldn’t be implemented with the time at hand. The issue only worsened as the deadline approached; major pieces had to be clobbered together instead of truly designed and engineered because the clock was running.
There are trade offs to make when it comes to partitioning time and energy. I like to think of it like a box. If you’ve given yourself limited time to complete a project, you’ve got yourself a small box, and you can only throw in tasks that are so large; at the end of the day, the box has to close. If you’ve given yourself more time to do something, great! There’s a larger box instead. But there will always only be so many things that can fit.
It gets more complicated than that though, because not all tasks were created equal. Some things you’d like to do may depend on research you need to do first, so you’ve got to throw that in – and there goes even more of your time – before you can throw in what you really want to accomplish. Or maybe you have to wait on someone else to finish something before you can move forward. Sure, you can throw in that task, but if what you’re waiting on just doesn’t get done, all you’ll do is end up taking up space that you could use some other way.
In the end, that box of stuff you have has suddenly turned in to a puzzle, one where you often don’t know which pieces fit together or where they belong until long after they’ve been thrown in to your box.
Oh, let’s not forget, the longer you sit there and think about how to fit everything into that volume of space, remember that all the while it’s shrinking.
How do you escape this struggle of having two many things and not enough time to do them in? Of course the simple answer is to find yourself a bigger box that’s simple enough to do if you have nothing else to worry about; but when is life ever worry-free? Often times there are clients demanding deliverables, there are assembly lines waiting for a fix, there are budgets and bosses all conspiring to keep your box as small as possible, and smaller still. There are times when you need to be an advocate for your own time, yet there’s only so much more time you can claim before the rest of the world takes notice.
The real value, though, is found when you start to take apart all the amorphous, ill-defined tasks and projects that you need to fit inside your box and break them down into smaller and smaller components. You’ll gain two immensely important things: 1, you’ll start to get a more accurate assessment of how much time and space you really need, and 2, you find that these bite-sized pieces can be packed more densely. You may find that breaking things apart gives you a larger volume of Inge you need to do than when you started with, but you’ll also find that more of these pieces can fit together in your box.
Still, that says nothing for the box that’s too small to fit the one thing you need to get done in the time you have. And that’s the real concern; if you time-box your product development and your design, you necessarily limit what you can make to whatever horizons you’ve set for yourself.
A sprint cycle means two weeks of hard work, of stress, and perhaps occasional misery, but there is the gratification of having a finished work at the end of the sprint to show for it. But what of all the great things that take four weeks, or four years to build? Small steps of success can sometimes leave no room for giant leaps of greatness.