Product cycles are built on top of our regular development cycles.
Each product cycle starts with a jog week, followed by five implementation weeks.
Disco's move and approach to development cycles is documented in our Project Delivery process here.
To properly dedicate time to working on Disco's products, we recognised we needed a structured process to allow us to figure out what to work on and assign people to do that work. This led to the development of our Product Delivery process.
One of the principles of the Product Delivery process is "Compatibility with projects" — trying to make sure that our product development processes work as closely as possible with our existing cycle-based workflow. As a result, we decided to layer product cycles on top of our existing cycle cadence.
The only difference is that product cycles are six weeks long, rather than three weeks long. This was done to minimise the number of additional interruptions during jog weeks, give product teams longer to properly prepare pitches, and to give teams more time and space to implement product work.
Product cycles share their jog week with the jog week for even-numbered development cycles (this offsets them against learning-focused jog weeks, which happen in odd-numbered development cycles).
The remaining five weeks are considered "implementation weeks" from the perspective of the product cycle (one of these five weeks is the jog week for odd-numbered development cycles, which run as normal).
Product cycles are given the same number as the development cycle they start with, to reduce confusion (this means we only have even-numbered product cycles - #30, #32, #34, etc).
The goal during a product cycle jog week is to review the work that was done in the previous product cycle and agree on the product-related work to be done in the following implementation weeks.
Product jog weeks have only a single dedicated ceremony, with all other product work handled through existing development ceremonies or asynchronous communication.
During the following five implementation weeks, there are no dedicated product-related ceremonies. Teams should be moving through the work that was agreed upon during the product pitch meeting.
Progress being made on product-related work is estimated, groomed and reported upon in the same manner as existing development work.