[brightball]

It’s only long compared to sprints. With standard PI planning you’re looking at 8-12 weeks and with the authors post above they are going by quarters. 6 is short by comparison.

The idea is that there are numerous pieces of work that your team will do which take longer than 2 weeks and you’re better off planning on a longer window so that you can find the best way to execute with clearer scope. This is the approach of all of the longer timelines and it’s much more effective in my experience.

The 6 week approach advocated by ShapeUp tries to find a balance from years of trial and error that balances “enough time” with “short enough that there’s still a sense of urgency”.

The other hard rule for this system is one that I’m a huge believer in. Namely, “if you are doing something that’s too big for 2-3 people to ship something in 6 weeks it’s too big and you need to trim it.”

It doesn’t say “complete” it says “ship something”. Thats key. There will always be work that takes more than 6 weeks, but you should always be able to find a way to slice it into smaller pieces that can be shipped. There are subtle things happening under the hood of this simple dynamic that force a lot of good practices from everyone involved too.