Entrepreneur
In my years of building startups and working with founders, one expectation remains constant: unrealistic product development cycles. Far too often, companies find themselves bogged down in time-consuming development processes, forced agile development flows and the resulting wasted resources and missed opportunities. Great operators know that building software isn’t a commodity. You can’t snap your fingers and call something “done.” It’s more of an art than science. And typically, building something interesting and valuable “takes as long as it takes.” So, my co-founders and I decided to adopt a new way of thinking: the six-week sprint. This isn’t just a product development strategy; it’s an approach to building and scaling businesses rapidly in an unpredictable landscape.
Rather than adhering to traditional, force-fit cycles, we focus on what we can achieve in six weeks. It’s a more realistic approach to building things at the early stage of a business. The “agile development” approach has created the idea that you should organize your work in two-week cycles. The result is a weird cadence that trivializes design, de-incentives more foundational product improvements and ignores feedback. Just because your JIRA ticket is marked as “complete” doesn’t mean you’ve shipped something people care about.
The power of a “release twice” approach
The foundation of the six-week sprint model lies in what we call a “release twice” methodology. A six-week cycle doesn’t mean there are no releases within that six weeks. It just means you have six weeks to prove your release is valuable or you’ve likely failed. As a result, you’ll need to release quickly to get the feedback you need to prove your feature meets expectations.
What we’ve found is that getting it there often requires a second release of the same feature set. If you can prove it in three weeks, you get a gold star, and it’s likely a positive indicator of how well you’re listening to customers or how tuned in you are to the problem space. Six weeks allows us to set real objectives and spend meaningful time getting an initiative right.
At my current venture, Bread, we help businesses get to market quickly with a well-designed, well-built foundation to set them up for future success. Many of these businesses are still in the idea stage of their product. A two-week sprint makes no sense in this context. For one customer, the first thing we needed to build and prove was a real-time voting mechanism. The initial concept required using SMS to vote. The first release took four weeks. We spent a week testing and iterating to learn that people wanted to wait until the last second to respond. Small delays in SMS delivery could prevent their vote from counting, and we had no access to when they initially cast their vote if their message was delayed. So we added the ability to vote in the UI. It resolved user concerns and we could mark the feature as released. Trying to fit that process into a two-week release cycle would have been silly. It took four weeks to build but five weeks to get it right.
One of the biggest advantages of this approach is that it prevents shipping the wrong thing and leaving it in your product. By validating features, designs and strategies through a fluid process, you can avoid the pitfall of product bloat. If something doesn’t work, you’ll figure it out quickly and you can pivot without losing momentum or wasting valuable resources. If you were to move on to the next thing, it just sits there.
This philosophy isn’t just limited to product development — it should be woven into your entire business strategy. From market expansion to operations, you should think about everything in terms of these mid-sized bets on progress, not features. It allows you to experiment, learn and adapt continuously.
Related: This Is the Framework to Make Your Product a Smash Success
Eliminating the backlog: A counterintuitive advantage
A key element of six-week cycles is eliminating backlogs. This may seem counterintuitive to those who have spent years working within the traditional framework of software development, where backlogs are a standard part of the process. But I’ve found that maintaining a backlog is essentially collecting a list of bad ideas and technical debt. Unless you’re an established business with a statistically relevant set of users, backlogs aren’t going to help you decide what to build next.
Backlogs tend to accumulate stale ideas that often never get addressed, leading to distraction and disorganization. Instead of keeping a list of deferred features and suggestions, you should focus solely on what is most important right now. This way, you align all your efforts toward immediate priorities, ensuring that your team is always focused on the present rather than what could be done in the distant future. As a result, you stay agile, responsive and forward-moving.
Additionally, with the release twice methodology, if you’ve proved what you’ve released quickly, you have the time to clean up your mess and resolve technical debt accrual.
Iterate quickly, minimize risk
The six-week cycle is still short enough to help avoid large, risky product launches. In a traditional product cycle, the emphasis is often on building something big over several months or even years. But the problem with this approach is that by the time a product is finally ready to launch, market conditions may have changed, customer needs may have shifted, or competition may have surpassed your offering.
An example of this is the dreaded “re-design.” More often than not, redesigns have horrible receptions. They take a long time if the surface area of your product is large and people don’t have to relearn a product they already invested time in learning.
In contrast, by working in mid-sized sprints, you have the time to release incremental redesigns, validate them with users and iterate quickly. This rapid feedback loop enables you to stay in tune with market demands and refine your products more efficiently, all while reducing the risk of launching something that misses the mark.
Related: How to Design and Produce Products from Scratch — A Step-by-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs
Applying the six-week method beyond product development
What makes the six-week methodology truly powerful is that it’s not confined to product development alone. You can apply the same framework to virtually every aspect of your business, from team-building to public relations to client management and even growth strategy.
For example, when my team considered expanding beyond mid-market accounts, we first experimented on a smaller scale. We gave our go-to-market team six weeks to craft a plan, design marketing collateral and build any prototypes required to close a deal. At the end of six weeks, they had to present their market signal. We analyzed the results and decided if we wanted to continue with the investment.
It took two, six-week sprints to make a decision to postpone market expansion. Not only was the traction lacking, but the feedback we got from the market indicated that we weren’t going to have the resources to meet their demand.
This approach has fostered a culture of experimentation among my colleagues, allowing us to respond quickly to new opportunities without being overwhelmed by the fear of failure.
The challenges of adopting a new mindset
As with any significant shift in process, adopting the six-week methodology comes with its own set of challenges. For one, working in these short sprints can create pressure. Deadlines are always just around the corner, and the compressed timeline demands that teams make decisions faster than they might be accustomed to. Also, without careful oversight, there’s a risk of becoming too focused on the immediate and losing sight of the broader, long-term vision.
It also requires a cultural shift. Teams that are used to long development cycles and backlogs may find it difficult to adjust to the new pace and focus. It requires buy-in from leadership and commitment at every level of the company to truly embrace this way of thinking.
But importantly, by taking small, calculated risks and continuously refining your process, you’ll be able to build a team that thrives on agility. Rather than being weighed down by extensive planning, pointless standups or development backlogs, you’re always moving, always testing and always improving.
Related: Why Slowing Down Will Get You Farther
A new framework for growth and innovation
In the end, successful startups aren’t determined by who has the most resources or the grandest plans. It’s about who can adapt the fastest, respond to changing market conditions and deliver consistent value. The six-week startup methodology provides a framework that allows companies to remain nimble in an increasingly competitive environment.
I believe this approach is the future of business growth and innovation. It challenges the traditional long-term development cycles and emphasizes the importance of quick, iterative progress. While it requires a significant mindset shift, the rewards are substantial: faster iteration, smarter resource use and, ultimately, greater success in a market that’s always changing.
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