[jasonpeacock]

Yep, ShapeUp describes an open "Cool Down" period between cycles, where people are free to work on whatever they want - favorite bugs, features, docs, developer tools, etc.

They discuss how everyone maintains their own personal list of what's important to them and use that to drive their work.

But maintaining a single, centralized list of everything has little value. Anything important is already being tracked in the roadmap, including bugs impacting customers of sufficient priority.

It really is worth reading the ShapeUp book, it provides a good, alternate view of commonly-held beliefs.

[marcoow]

ShapeUp is great! I don't think a cool-down phase is good though – if something is important to someone and it is indeed important for the business but still doesn't get planned in any iterations that means either

a) it's not actually important compared to other things so having someone work on it in a cool down phase is likely not well-spent time

or

b) there is a dysfunctional team/organization in which important stuff doesn't get prioritized correctly (typical example for this being 100% product management driven organizations in which refactorings etc. never get any time assigned)