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

7 mcsolid 19 5/8/2025, 11:41:41 PM

The leadership of the company I’m at is forcing all teams to do 1 week sprints instead of 2 because they believe that they can get more out of the teams and get better visibility into progress. We’ve debated for months that teams aren’t getting enough upfront time to plan while still taking on the same meeting load as 2 week sprints basically every week. All the engineers, leads and product leads want to as well. I don’t know what to do anymore. All the teams are getting burned out from meeting overload and not enough prep time. Any advice?

Comments (19)

muzani · 17m ago

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 better at teamwork, we only needed 0 or 1 days.

We do have 1 week sprints but it's about 90 minutes of sprint related meetings/week on average and that includes stand ups, retros and demos.

Work estimation into the schedule. They're called spikes. Time box them. No commitment is made without the confidence of the spikes. If you don't have confidence by the end of the spike, then something is wrong - the requirements is unclear, code is too opaque, you don't have the data, someone isn't cooperating, etc. These are all very valid outcomes of a spike. Maybe you need to call someone. Maybe you need to refactor.

ManlyBread · 55m ago

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.

joezydeco · 10h ago

Break every story into an obscenely large number of subtasks or tickets and bury the backlog. Make it so large that the amount of time sorting and planning will take most of the week. Stick to the work in each ticket and don't work on the next ones until the sprint is closed.

JojoFatsani · 9h ago

Agile is extremely gamable.

That said.. just break the tasks down to as small and granular as possible and take on fewer.

solardev · 10h ago

Start looking for a new job... once a company starts going down that path, they're bleeding to death and trying to band-aid it. It won't work. It's a sign of desperation and poor management that usually won't be reversible.

TheMongoose · 8h ago

Realize that when a company is doing Agile at you that everything is made up and the points don't matter. Make your t-shirts smaller and do whatever you were going to do anyway.

mcsolid · 7h ago

They are also forcing time based pointing onto the teams too. 1 point per engineer day. There are other issues with the leadership expecting each engineer to be able to support 5-6 “points” a week but that’s another story.

TheMongoose · 7h ago

Still doesn't matter. Make Jira say whatever they want. Or you could enjoy applying endlessly in the currently completely hosed job market.

akerl_ · 11h ago

Delete every meeting that isn’t directly related to either tracking the sprint, working on items on the sprint, or personnel management/growth, and then spent your time doing the work.

Or quit, I guess, if the difference between 1 and 2 week sprints is a deal breaker for you.

toomuchtodo · 11h ago

Start looking for your next job. When you land somewhere, bring with anyone worth bringing with. This assumes you have no leverage to prevent them from squeezing you and the team(s) harder.

owebmaster · 53m ago

I think you can 10x this. Propose 1-day sprints. Make them understand that shorter sprints don't make development faster.

quintes · 10h ago

They just want faster delivery? Or more meaningful progress tracking?

Usually I find I want improved traceability of the work, and so that means clearly calling out:

planning, defining, scoping and building.

If those on the left are poorly completed that in the right will suffer.

mcsolid · 9h ago

Yeah this is exactly what we’re seeing too.

codingdave · 11h ago

Honestly, quit.

Anyone still sticking to Scrum is already behind the times on creating an enjoyable work environment. If they are pushing for shorter sprints, they are doubling down on what makes it bad, not what makes it good.

I'm all for trying to make a place better before giving up, but this is one of the few leadership decisions that are an exception to my ideals. I would just walk out the door, no hesitation.

mcsolid · 9h ago

What are the alternatives? I would love to hear what works well so I know what to look for.

cosmicgadget · 11h ago

Adjust estimates accordingly?

jbellis · 11h ago

for me the problem here is an org that debates sprint length for months

mcsolid · 9h ago

Exactly that being a problem within itself. It feels so counter to the philosophy of Agile being “people over process”. If the people are saying they need more prep time why aren’t they listening?

scarface_74 · 6h ago

Do your job for 8 hours a day, close your computer and wait for money to appear in your account every pay period.

“Once the avalanche has started, the pebbles no longer have a vote”