Why we settled on the two-week sprint

We tried retainers for the first three years of the studio. They were fine for revenue and bad for everything else. The work that landed each month was whatever was loudest, the people who shouted least went unattended, and at the end of the quarter both we and the client struggled to write a list of what we had actually done.

We tried fixed-price projects after that. Those were better for clarity and worse for honesty. The temptation to pretend the scope was fixed when it had clearly changed, on both sides, made for a tense second half of every engagement.

The two-week sprint is what we settled on after a long internal argument and an even longer client one. Each sprint is a self-contained piece of work with a written brief at the start, a single deliverable at the end, and a fee that is paid before the work begins. There is no ambiguity about what a sprint is for, what it costs, or whether it has been completed. There is also no penalty for stopping after one sprint and resuming three months later.

What surprised us is that clients who had previously asked for a retainer often only needed three or four sprints a year. The retainer model was charging them for capacity they were not using and asking us to invent things to fill the gap. The sprint model bills them for work that exists, and lets the relationship breathe in between.

The other thing that surprised us is how much it changed the inside of the studio. A two-week unit is short enough that nobody loses interest, long enough that real work gets done, and structured enough that the producer knows exactly what to plan for the next two weeks at any given Monday. We hired one fewer person than we expected to need this year because the throughput went up.