How to write a week's scope in one paragraph

Every Monday, we agree with whoever we’re working with what will ship on Friday, and write it down as one paragraph. It takes about ten minutes of a thirty-minute call. It’s the habit the whole week is built around, and anyone can borrow it, whether or not you work with us.

Why a paragraph

A ticket list tells you what people will be busy with. A paragraph tells you what will be true on Friday that isn’t true today.

Those are different things. It is entirely possible to close every ticket and deliver nothing a customer could see. A paragraph makes that hard, because it has to describe an outcome in plain words, and everyone in the call can tell whether it has happened.

The length is a feature too. If the week’s work can’t be described in a paragraph, it won’t fit in a week.

The five sentences

There’s no rigid template, but a good paragraph has five parts.

1. What will be live or clickable on Friday. One sentence, in the client’s words. “The new pricing page is live and taking traffic from the search campaign.”

2. What is deliberately left out. This is the sentence people skip, and it prevents the most arguments. “The comparison table and the FAQ section are not part of this week.”

3. What we need from you, and by when. “We need final prices from you by Tuesday evening.”

4. How we’ll know it worked. One check anyone can make. “A test enquiry from the page arrives in the CRM with the campaign name attached.”

5. What happens if something blocks it. “If the prices aren’t confirmed by Tuesday, we ship the page with the current prices and update them when they arrive.”

That’s the whole thing. It goes in the shared channel straight after the call, so nobody has to rely on memory.

An example

Here is one written out in full.

By Friday, the support inbox assistant is sorting incoming email into the four queues in a test mailbox, using last month’s real messages. It will not send any replies yet, and it won’t touch the live inbox. We need read access to the support mailbox by Monday evening. It has worked if at least the team lead agrees with its sorting on the fifty examples we picked together. If access is delayed, we run the same test on the exported messages you sent last week.

Read that on Friday and there’s no debate about whether the week delivered.

What goes wrong, and the fix

The paragraph describes activity. “Continue work on the dashboard” is not a scope. Ask what someone will be able to open on Friday, and rewrite until the sentence answers that.

It quietly grows during the week. New ideas are welcome. They go into next Monday’s conversation, and the paragraph stays as it was. If something truly can’t wait, rewrite the paragraph together and take something out.

Nobody wrote down the exclusion. A lot of disappointment comes from something the client assumed was included. Say the obvious out loud and write it down.

The check is vague. “It works” can’t be tested. “A test order appears in the warehouse system within a minute” can.

Try it for one week

Pick a piece of work you already have in progress. On Monday, write the five sentences. On Friday, read them back. Watch the second sentence, the one about what’s left out. It does more to keep a week on track than any of the others.

If you’d like to see the rhythm from the inside, a two-week sprint with us is two of these paragraphs and two Fridays.