Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Agile Countdown
Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.
There’s a novelty sign you see every once and a while that goes: “Fish and visitors stink after three days”. While it may not be as short as three days, establishing an appropriate iteration length in your agile development process can have you start reflecting on that old saying. So just what is the right length for you?
Theoretically, you are going to look for a turnaround period where everyone in the group can get on board and feel comfortable with the decision. This means also trying to push for a period where people can operate at a regular pace--not too slow and not too fast, and certainly not something where you feel you have to cram periodically. It’s human nature to want to sit back and relax if an iteration period is too long, compressing the work needed into a shorter period at the end and creating all sorts of stress. Alternately, making an iteration period that is too long is just a consistent stress inducer, broken only by the coming of the weekend.
Finding a happy medium that keeps the group working steadily and minimizes those moments is a great way to remove those anxiety factors and foster a repeatable team experience for many projects yet to come. Talk to others who are practicing agile development and you’ll find they are working around a one- to four-week timeframe for each iteration. You might need to …
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