We are clueless about how long things should take
Project plans and estimates are usually fantasies made only to give executives a sense of control. For people who are actually trying to get something done in the world, I think the better thing to do is give them actual control via short-cycle processes and frequent delivery.<p>At my last startup, we got very good at releasing early and often. What would have been projects elsewhere got broken down into very small releasable units; our average story size was under a day. Very occasionally my cofounder would have us ballpark estimate two different batches of work using arbitrary points, just so he could get a sense of the relative cost of two paths. But we never estimated in terms of dates.<p>This worked for us because he really took advantage of the speed of iteration. Almost everything we built came with a question. In the next user test, would users understand it? Would they want to use it? Did they react as expected? When we sent some traffic to it, did people engage? Did the right people engage? Did they return to use it later, indicating value? Etc, etc.<p>The answers to those questions would drive what we did next. Because our goal wasn&#x27;t to build features, but to make things happen in the real world. And once you get used to continuous learning, it&#x27;s obvious that planning too far in advance is wasteful. All of the brilliant ideas you had a month ago weren&#x27;t based on what you learned in the last month. Eventually, sensible people learn to stop producing a lot of plans that never get fully used. And, of course, to stop asking for estimates on them.