Stage 2 · Lesson 3 of 8
Milestones and estimates as ranges
Break the project into , and make each one something you can demo. "One customer can pay by card in " is a good milestone (staging is the test copy of ). " done" is not.
Demoable milestones expose integration problems, where the pieces fail to fit together, early, while they are still cheap to fix. Give estimates as ranges with a confidence, such as "four to six weeks, most likely five". Narrow the range as unknowns get answered.
A single date hides uncertainty, and people hear it as a promise. For work across teams, put the riskiest connection between teams in the first milestone, not the last.
Common trapmilestones split by team or layer: they all look green until the week everything has to connect, and then the whole project turns red at once.
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Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- BookFreeShape Up
Ryan Singer, Basecamp · Intermediate
Free book on shaping and scoping work so projects actually finish
- BookFreeGoogle Site Reliability Engineering Book
Google · Advanced
The chapters on managing incidents and blameless postmortem culture