Focus and followthrough are the moat

The points are fake and the score is made up but we always finish 70% of our sprint and get around 30 points done per person. Hey waitaminute that almost sounds useful 🤨 I've said before that working in a high growth startup is like spinning plates – you do a bit here a bit there and kick the can to survive another day. There's always more work than people and spaceship-first development makes this worse because starting is easy and finishing is hard. On my team we add ~50 new ideas to triage every sprint, work on 5 or 6 ongoing major projects, keep our production systems running (the SRE work), and build any number of little features and bugfixes that keep folks happy and aren't worth the overhead of a project. Continue reading →