03
Two-week cycles
Sprint-based engagements run on hard two-week cycles. Day 1 plans, Day 14 ships, Day 15 the client decides whether to continue. No fuzzy quarters, no rolling roadmaps.
Placeholder method entry. Rewrite the body before launch.
A cycle is fourteen days. The first day is planning, the last day is demo and handoff, and the twelve days in between are execution. Cycles do not slip into the next cycle. If the work is not done, the next cycle picks it up — explicitly, with a new estimate.
Between cycles, the client decides what happens. Continue. Pause. Scale up. Scale down. End. There is no rollover, no implicit renewal, and no “we’ll figure it out next sprint.”
Why
Long engagements rot. Two-week cycles force the question that long engagements avoid: is this still worth doing? Asking it every fourteen days kills bad work earlier than any retro can.
How we do it
- Cycle goal is one sentence, agreed on Day 1, and never edited mid-cycle.
- Mid-cycle scope changes are deferred to the next cycle’s plan unless the client and the lead engineer both sign off.
- Day 14 is a working demo on the staging environment, not a slide deck.