Startup, Scaleup, Screwup.

14A Pleasure to Burn

Keep an eye on your progress with Burn-down Charts, Burn-up Charts, or Cumulative Flow Diagrams.

 

It was a Monday. I looked at our weekly progress metrics and saw an increase in completed points from 13 to 28. That was 15 points of work done in one week, which was pretty good! The week before, it was just four points and the week before that it was zero. The team was finally picking up speed. As a result, I felt a bit less concerned about the product features we would be able to show off at the big event in San Diego.

Our measurement of the amount of work done was quite simple. We had our Product Backlog spreadsheet with many cells showing a priority for urgency and some points for importance. One point for regular features, two points for the most valuable ones. That was it. There was no estimation involved or anything complicated. The number of points completed per week was the easiest way for us to measure how much progress we were making toward the public launch of the product, our Project San Diego.

By drawing a simple chart of the points, we completed per week, we could see that we probably wouldn’t get everything done but it looked like we would get close. If we could stick to a production speed of around 15 points per week, we would have 150 points done at the time of the launch, which would be 84 percent of our goal. Not perfect by far, but good ...