Introduction

Speaker 3
Welcome to rework podcast by 37 Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host Kimberly Rhodes. It's been said many times before on this podcast that as a company 37 Signals works in six week cycles. Each team plans what they're going to accomplish over the course of just six weeks. And with the final cycle of the year upon us, I thought it made sense to dive into a chapter of the book rework called your estimates suck. To talk about it, I'm joined by the co-founders of 37 Signals and the authors of rework Jason Freed and David Heine my, our hands in guys, I assume when you say your estimates that that's not just when it comes to software development, but across the board and business. True? Yeah, David,
Speaker 2
you want to take this one? I know this is for a year.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think it's just been proven over and over again that humans are terrible at estimating anything complicated that involves novel attempts at problem solving. If you know exactly what you're going to do, it's somewhat easier, but I'd actually say even then it's hard. I mean, construction is a great example. We've been building houses for a very long time and yet still somehow it's quite difficult to hit an estimate unless you're building a cookie cutter thing that you've done exactly the same thing five times before or 10 times before then your estimates might be closer. But if you're trying to do anything novel at all, anything that involves new problem solving, you just got to accept the fact that we are awful at estimating. And the way I remember this from the early days of the company is really funny because
Speaker 2
I remember trying really hard to get better at estimating
Speaker 1
that you know what the problem with estimates were just that we weren't trying hard enough that we didn't have the right scheme of doing it. If we just broke tasks down better and were more specific in our estimation, or maybe if we applied a more generous margin, we timed 1.2 or 1.5 or 2 to our estimates, it would come out just right. And we actually did that in the early days of even creating base camp because when we were creating base camp, I had 10 hours a week and I remember thinking, you know what, we got to really make those 10 hours
Speaker 2
count.

Your Estimates Suck

REWORK

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts