Running Biweekly Sprints

We at Crownstack use 15-day sprints in almost everything we do. Agile product development practices, where the team delivers work in an iterative manner at periodic time intervals, inspired the concept of sprints. We are using the same concept in almost all departments, where not only the engineering team, but other teams in HR, recruitment, finance, and marketing are also using these biweekly sprints.

Duration: Although the team can choose the duration of sprints, which works best for them, we generally work in 15-day sprints. Our sprints start on the 1st of every month and the 16th of every month. This arrangement gives us two sprints per month and 24 sprints per year. To make things simple, our sprints are numbered from 1 to 24. We reset the sprint at the end of each year. Therefore, sprint 01 starts on 1st Jan and sprint 24 ends on 31st December.

Running these numbered sprints has the advantage of keeping all departments in sync. We know that if sprint X is running, all the teams in HR, engineering, marketing have set up a goal for that particular sprint, and at the end of the sprint, each team will have something to show for.

Our only complaint is that sprints start on Fridays and end on Mondays due to fixed sprint dates. Also, sometimes you have to skip some sprints and to match the common numbers, you might start sprint 04 after sprint 02 ends. We are fine with both these limitations, as for us, advantages outweigh these inconveniences.

Following are some examples of how our teams run sprints

1. Quicklabs: Quicklabs is our product development studio where our engineering talent builds world-class products. We strive to run everything on a 2-week sprint basis. We plan work for 2 weeks and at the end of a sprint, we push workable code into production. Our cool-down sprints are also of two-week duration.
2. Recruitment & HR: Our recruitment team tries to process each candidate in our pipeline within a sprint. We review our recruitment efforts at the end of each sprint. Almost everything related to HR also gets done in two-week sprints.
3. Review Meetings: We mandate that all our team leads conduct a biweekly review meeting with their team members. This frequency works best for us. We feel doing more meetings than this number helps no one, and doing less frequent meetings than this creates communication gaps between teams.
4. Learning goals: We have various upskilling and learning initiatives at Crownstack. All of these processes run with similar frequency.

Managing conflicts with customers: Most of our customers are building software products and their team might also be following some sort of sprint planning and execution frequency. In that case, we follow their plans. Our biweekly sprints are a way to manage internal work rather than the client’s work; therefore, whenever a conflict arises, stick to the customer’s plan.