Ask HN: My company is forcing 1 week sprints. What should I do? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: My company is forcing 1 week sprints. What should I do?

#41

Post by datadrivenangel » Sat, May 10, 2025, 3:13 AM UTC

mcsolid wrote: post #37

datadrivenangel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See if your manager knows what's going on. They may be just as oppressed as you feel! And they may be willing to go along with smaller secret team-level experiments. Maybe Kanban will result in even better visibility and performance! (And satisfaction)

Yeah, unfortunately I did and have been declined several times to experiment. I've also suggested Kanban too since it feels more in line with the pace and the lacking requirements and also shut down several times.

Do the experiment at the smallest level possible. And if not, it's time to suck it up or find a new job.

Re: Ask HN: My company is forcing 1 week sprints. What should I do?

#42

Post by nivertech » Sat, May 10, 2025, 3:49 AM UTC

Ask to move to 0 week sprints - aka KANBAN - no planning ;)

Ideally KANBAN should be used only for reactive work (bug fixing, ops, support, etc.), but I guess with incompetent management every work is reactive work :(

Re: Ask HN: My company is forcing 1 week sprints. What should I do?

#43

Post by ManlyBread » Sat, May 10, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

scarface_74 wrote: post #35

ManlyBread wrote: post #18

The worst thing you can do is to try and make it work. Do everything in your power to make that idea fail, since that is the only way your management will change their minds.

Yes they may change their minds about keeping him employed

Good luck trying to convince potential new employees to come and work in 1 week sprints

Re: Ask HN: My company is forcing 1 week sprints. What should I do?

#44

Post by scarface_74 » Sat, May 10, 2025, 2:46 PM UTC

ManlyBread wrote: post #43

scarface_74 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they may change their minds about keeping him employed

Good luck trying to convince potential new employees to come and work in 1 week sprints

You haven’t looked for a job lately have you? I was looking for bog standard enterprise dev jobs as a “Plan B” last year and the year before last.

Every single opening had literally hundreds of applicants in the first week - LinkedIn Quick Apply - shows you.

Hiring managers say the same thing.

Re: Ask HN: My company is forcing 1 week sprints. What should I do?

#45

Post by muzani » Sat, May 10, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

thiht wrote: post #38

muzani wrote: post #20

I find 1 week ideal without the overhead. Remove unnecessary demos or retros. You need the feedback cycle but often 1-3 months is fine, and 2 weeks is only useful for a beginner team. You do need planning, context, and meetings to discuss the context. We moved these to two days a week where anyone is free to interrupt anyone else and call for a call right now. Nobody expects to be in flow on these days. But as we got…

> Remove unnecessary demos or retros Remove the 2 most important meetings in a functioning team?

If it's important to you, then keep it, of course. Every team is different just like all code is different.

The symptoms of too many meetings is people don't attend them, work during them, complain about not getting things done, etc. If the retros are working, you shouldn't need many of them. If they're not (which sounds like OP's case), then they should be less frequent.

Demos tend to be redundant. Most of the teams I worked with know exactly what the team just built; sometimes the CEO is QA. In the bigger teams, the stakeholders might be juggling too many things to attend anyway.

Re: Ask HN: My company is forcing 1 week sprints. What should I do?

#46

Post by muzani » Sat, May 10, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

mcsolid wrote: post #26

muzani wrote: post #20

I find 1 week ideal without the overhead. Remove unnecessary demos or retros. You need the feedback cycle but often 1-3 months is fine, and 2 weeks is only useful for a beginner team. You do need planning, context, and meetings to discuss the context. We moved these to two days a week where anyone is free to interrupt anyone else and call for a call right now. Nobody expects to be in flow on these days. But as we got…

Saying this probably indicates more problems but they also insist on demos each week and demos/retros every 2 weeks. Also they want metrics/retros to track team velocity. How much time per week do you have dedicated to sprint meetings? Another issue we have is requirements are always lacking because it’s always fires (and everything is P1).

The most efficient form I've seen is one 30 min meeting to discuss what we plan to do and what went wrong/well with previous plans. And a second 60 min meeting at the end of the week to show what we've done, the impact, and the GTM plan.

But if you have frequent P1 fires, then you definitely need the retros quite often. In our case, we always do post mortems for a P1. We dig deep into root causes and this alone is a significant meeting. If it's P1, then, well, it should take everyone's attention. If it's not that major, then it should be some other level. But they shouldn't be happening more than one a quarter or something. It's okay to not be adding features – sometimes reducing fires is significant progress, lol.

Sprint planning meetings for us is just 30 min. We update a doc, it doubles as the retro. Most of the tickets and stuff is already managed by Jira; PM just ticks what we plan to do that sprint. Requirements have already been reviewed before the meeting starts, the meeting is where we work out a plan for it.