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Headline driven development

Here is a simple process for shipping software projects that works. First, decompose the project into a stream¹ of headlines. Then pick an aggressive date to ship the first headline and work like hell to meet that date. Have everyone work only on one headline at a time– the upcoming one. Ignore everything else. Don’t work on anything that doesn’t help you ship the headline. Once the headline is shipped, switch to the next headline in the stream and repeat. That’s all, you can fire your agile consultant.

A headline is a very short sentence that contains only the highest order bit, with all the other bits culled. Imagine you bump into someone on the street after not having seen them for a few months and they ask what you’ve been up to. What kinds of responses work well in this situation? “I trekked through Southeast Asia”, “I switched jobs”, “I got married”. Software release headlines work the same way. “You can now rent VMs through an API”, “we rolled out FSD autopilot”, “Treasury is available in India”.

Headline driven development works really well for three reasons.

First, headlines is how humans process change. If you ever found your users confused, your boss frustrated, your investors anxious, your peers indifferent– these problems go away when you organize communication around a stream of headlines. But it doesn’t work as an afterthought. Communicating through headlines but developing in some other way is like leading a double life. It gets too messy. So to communicate with headlines you must develop with headlines too.

Second, it makes it easy to ruthlessly prioritize. If you can credibly ship a headline without something, cut that something. For example, suppose you’re working on your Southeast Asia trek headline and you’re planning to visit six countries. Can you credibly say to your friends “I trekked through Southeast Asia” only having visited five countries instead of six? Obviously yes. So one of the countries gets cut. How about four countries? Repeatedly go through this exercise and stop before the credibility of the headline is at risk. You want to do the minimum possible amount of work that still leaves the headline credible.

Third, the deadline effect is real. Most of the work in college happens at midnight before the project is due. The industry isn’t that different. So simulating class assignments turns out to be a very effective way to ship quickly. You need a discrete chunk of work, with an arbitrary deadline², and a binary outcome. You get this with headlines– a headline has either shipped by a given timestamp or it hasn’t.

Apr 01, 2024

1. I mean “stream” in a programming language sense– an infinite list of elements with ability to pop one at a time.

2. Advertise arbitrary deadlines to candidates up front and let self-selection do its magic.