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Phase 4: Cool-down
During the building cycle, there is no any time to breathe and think about what’s next. The end of a cycle is the worst time to meet and plan because everybody is too busy finishing projects and making last-minute decisions in order to ship on time.
Therefore, after a building cycle, we schedule 1–2 weeks for cool-down (depends on the size of the building cycle). This is a period with no scheduled work where we can breathe, meet as needed, and consider what to do next.
During cool-down, programmers and designers on project teams are free to work on whatever they want. After working hard to ship their projects, they enjoy having time under their control. They use it to:
- preparation for next Cycle
- fix bugs
- explore new ideas
- try out new technical possibilities
Planning
Usually, 1–3 days before the start of the cool-down period, the dev team has a call where we can discuss priorities for the cool-down. Every developer should know existing midterm goals (a team lead should share them) and check existing technical issues and based on this information propose tasks. Then, on the call, we’ll analyze our plans and pick up the best ideas to move to the pipeline.
Materials
To understand how betting works and what it entails, please read chapters 10–15 of the "Shape Up" book:
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