It's fascinating to watch 37signals adapt as it becomes a <i>slightly</i> larger company. I think the number of features accomplished is pretty impressive for it being their first attempt at this new way of working. Across multiple products, no less.<p>My first reaction to a lot of their learnings was "Duh", but of course I've only learned a number of those lessons after several years working with agile dev teams. Credit to them for sharing all of this.
I remember in college always being hammered with "break down problems into appropriately sized, manageable chunks." This looks like a great approach to it. Focus on a specific issue for a 2-week block, design-develop-deploy, and move on.<p>Key quote: "Late nights are a sign of scope failure. Hero mode is a sign of scope failure." Bingo. If you're regularly going into those modes, it means the problems weren't broken down into right-sized pieces.
Is programming twice as much work as designing? (2 programmers, 1 designer).<p>What would change if programming was 4x faster than it is now (e.g. because of imaginary better tools)? Would you do 2 designers with 1 programmer? Could you offload some of the designer work to programmers?
I've worked in 1-2 week sprints for ages, and it works really well. As pointed out in the article, 1-2 weeks is a horizon/deadline that you can _feel_. That pressure focuses.<p>As a humorous side note, the following quote really reminded me of the cadence of <a href="http://friedisms.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://friedisms.tumblr.com/</a><p>"We want to throw work overboard, not our sanity or our sleep. Late nights are a sign of scope failure. Hero mode is a sign of scope failure. You can’t compartmentalize burnout. Yes, we start new iterations every two weeks, but burnout carries over. The scope hammer helps eliminate burnout."