Ask HN: My company is forcing 1 week sprints. What should I do?
7 mcsolid 20 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?
You’ve got leadership that doesn’t understand how to deliver software, but you also almost certainly have a transparency problem. You probably can’t do much about the former but you can the latter.
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.
That said.. just break the tasks down to as small and granular as possible and take on fewer.
Or quit, I guess, if the difference between 1 and 2 week sprints is a deal breaker for you.
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.
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.
“Once the avalanche has started, the pebbles no longer have a vote”