As we further adopt Shape Up, I’ve heard numerous teams struggling to understand how to adopt Shape Up in the context of how they currently work. One particular thing that some teams struggle with is how to handle unplanned work.
Ryan Singer was visiting Detroit a few weeks ago, and during our conversation, he helped me gain clarity around the different types of work.
Many organizations tend to lump all tasks together, leading to a vast, undifferentiated pile known as the Backlog. Though teams may prioritize or categorize these tasks, the essence remains the same, much like rearranging eggs in a carton doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a carton of eggs. This approach often blurs the distinction between strategic initiatives and a whirlwind of other tasks.
It’s super helpful to classify the types of work that exist on a product team.
1. Strategic Work - These projects contribute to company and product growth and add considerable value. This can encompass adding or improving features or considerable refactoring aimed at decreasing product lead times. These tasks are integral to the product's vision and the creation of value.
2. Small Tasks - Sometimes, you have to sweat the small stuff, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of making real progress. These minor tasks could involve fixing minor problems that are bothersome to customers or us, refactoring small segments of the codebase, addressing non-critical bugs, or making slight enhancements to the user interface. These are tasks we want to complete but they don’t take priority over strategic tasks.
3. Urgent Tasks - Certain circumstances demand immediate attention. Servers go down, critical bugs pop up, or something fails in the production environment due to an oversight in testing. These tasks require immediate attention, often necessitating other work to be put on hold.
This simple model can help us in two ways. First, it’s very helpful to classify your work to see where time and effort are allocated. If your time is primarily consumed by dealing with urgent tasks, then this suggests a need for improved stability and quality. Conversely, if you are overly occupied with small tasks, this could indicate a deficiency in strategic thinking and planning. Ideally, a majority of your time should be devoted to strategic work.
Second, the model is great in helping us build a better process for executing all three. Shape Up is a fantastic framework for strategic product work. It can also be used for planning and executing small tasks in batches or during cooldowns. But it says little about urgent tasks. Here is a process that we’re experimenting with.
We use Shape Up for strategic work, with a list of framed bets. In our betting sessions, we select which bets to shape for the next cycle based on our goals, roadmap, interdependence, resources, etc.
For small tasks and any urgent matters, we utilize a Kanban board. These are tasks we want to tackle but aren't strategic.
We assess our capacity and appetite for the smaller tasks during cycle planning. If we don’t have enough strategic work to keep the team busy, or there are enough small tasks that have become important, we create a small batch project and execute it as planned project work.
Teams with regular urgent tasks should reserve capacity for them. This ensures those working on strategic projects remain focused. This responsibility can rotate among members. During the cycle, such teams can address small tasks on the Kanban board and shift to urgent matters as they arise. This work is unplanned, but it can still allow for progress to be made, while also ensuring strategic work doesn’t become the victim of the “urgent”.