But our biggest struggle was that our projects were often smaller than the standard cycle size. We found ourselves trying to plan several smaller projects into a single 6-week cycle, effectively trying to run a planning two months ahead to fill the bucket which is more difficult and less reliable than in a shorter cadence. We lost the flexibility to reprioritize every two weeks, but we didn’t gain the benefit of deep, singular focus on one large feature. It also meant ‘fast-follows’ on projects to steer impact had to wait until the next cycle.
Love reading about real experience with different methodologies. It seems for this company it was more a matter of fit than practice? Besides haven’t we all moved on to scrum-ban now..
Quote Citation: Alex Wauters, “2 years with Shape-Up, and why we switched back | Scale X”, 2025-12-09, https://scalex.dev/blog/2-years-with-shape-up/