Transmission #6: Living in cycles 🚲

How to think in loops of progress and a beginners guide to SCRUM

May 16, 2024

`Read Time: 5.20 Minutes`

This is a ‘Transmission’ from the Jupiter Dispatch, featuring curated links and stories to provide you with new ideas, growth tactics, and frameworks tailored for european entrepreneurs.

Servus Friend,

In today’s ‘Transmission’ we’ll have look into why working in cycles can move your game to the next level.

Getting in progress and momentum is such an important goal to bring your projects and ideas to life.

So cycle up your game…

Today’s List of Stuff:

📚 Avoid pile-ups and work in cycles for a fast track to success 🏎️
👏 Finally what SCRUM is really about 🔂
#Domi's favourite 5 - Random Cycle Edition 🔄

#1 📚 Avoid pile-ups and work in cycles for a fast track to success 🏎️

Being effective when working alone or with an intrinsic motivation on new businesses or projects is a hard one. Big ideas seem often unsolvable at the beginning. Too many factors and show-killers are on the way.

It can get intimidating to start at all. A common solution to this working with deadlines to push you along to success.

But many of us are setting their agenda wrong. Most of the time the time spans are to far away. To do’s are starting to pile-up and overcrowd your thinking.

A simple solution is to work in cycles. But other than you may think, cutting this cycles short is the option you should choose. But what is the magic number?

Basecamp founder Jason Fried thinks six weeks should be enough time to bring in good results. Six weeks ensures that you can easily prioritise your tasks and build some momentum which leads you the way.

A even more extreme cycle proposition comes form YC-Partner Michael Seibel. At the beginning of a new venture you have to move fast to find traction and motivation.

Here is one of my favourite clips of all time… (only 5 mins)

If you look up many famous and great founders and CEOs you will recognise they all have a bias to action in common. Action means having short cycles. So instead of planning out the whole year, may think of planning out a six week cycle.

#2 👏 Finally what SCRUM is really about 🔂

Working in cycles isn’t a young idea. Since decades small and big teams planning out deadlines and reviews to work more effective towards a major goal.

Complex problems needs to be addressed in certain ways to be solved. Especially in IT this forced a whole industry to think about good frameworks to make a leap forward.

One of the answers and currently the most “hot” method is SCRUM. Of course you heard from this before, but many non-technical persons still don’t know what this is about.

Here is a short explanation, how a SCRUM team works…

In general a SCRUM team works in 4 or often 3 weeks sprint. You can think of a sprint like a cycle. It’s starts with a sprint planning where the whole team decides which ideas they try to develop, test and implement in the cycle.

Then they start into the sprint. The team, usually a product manager (the team lead and ear to the stakeholders), a scrum master (like a referee in sports) and 6-8 engineers, work then on the sprint items they chose before.

Every day they do a short 10 mins daily to updated for the today’s tasks. At the end of the circle they post the updates and have sprint review with the whole team and the stakeholders to assess the progress. After that the whole team has a sprint retro there they talk through their learnings of the cycle.

Then repeat, a new cycle starts. This is in basic terms a SCRUM cycle.

If you want to dig deeper here’s a great guide for the whole idea of SCRUM…