A (free) cycle without betting table. Any experience?

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Hey good people,

I wanted to share here this experiment we called “Free cycle”

We are a small team (10 people only) and because of the holiday season, the whole team would not be available so was difficult to plan a normal cycle and the squads that would work on the pitches.

Instead of a betting table and shapers writing pitch, we tried that everyone on the team pitched something that they wanted to work / explore on.

They would write a pitch in a similar way we were pitching but instead of a betting table selecting what would be worked on, they would choose.

Of course this is pretty experimental and we don’t expect that a big feature gets released at the end.

But something that was interesting is that with this experiment, we started to identify people from the team that had more skills and motivation for shaping and writing a pitch. So that was a big and good surprise.

I think also the team was very motivated and I feel that could be useful for recharging energy too.

Have you tried something like that? What’s your experience?
If you haven’t tried something like that I would really like to hear also your opinion about this.

Regards
— Juan

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I’m glad the experiment worked!

What you’re describing sounds to me like a longer-duration version of the cool down. I’ve never tried something like this, so thanks for sharing.

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Hey thanks for your reply @nt-from-chicago !

At first I thought that it was like a longer cooldown.
But we use the cooldown for some sync meetings like a Retrospective, and 1:1s coaching.

And also we don’t ask the team to write a small pitch of what they are attacking in the cooldowns, they just write a Pull Request and do it.

That’s was (I think) a very different aspect, here we asked them to write a small pitch. And that’s how we are seeing some people that have a genuine curiosity for thinking and writing pitches.

Let me know if you try or if you have some question about it !

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