Are we moving too fast?

I remember the sprint planning meeting so clearly. I had joined Peloton the week prior and the team was heads-down trying to launch a major refactor of the iOS app. After calculating how many story points we were going to tackle in the next sprint, our project manager, Asma Khan, asked the group: “are we moving too fast?”

I’ll never forget this question. In my three years in the industry so far (sans internships), this was the first time I was asked to reflect on our pace potentially being too fast. Agile Development centers on a major interval training metaphor, namely sprints. But, Agile almost entirely misses the other side of the coin: regimented rest. We can’t expect teams to knock out a monotonically increasing amount of story points, sprint after sprint. Sometimes, you have to move slower now to move faster later.

Naval Ravikant recently posted a great perspective on the Athlete ⇔ Knowledge Worker metaphor:

Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes - train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

— Naval Ravikant (@naval) June 10, 2017

I hope the next wave of development paradigms borrow from what we’ve learned in training world-class athletes¹. To list a few: sound bodies make for sound minds, sleep deprivation is a false badge of honor², information diets are akin to nutritional diets, managers should also aim to be coaches (teachers), and being comfortable with being uncomfortable is a skill we can cultivate.

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