My friend received his first opportunity to plan the roadmap.

He’s surprised because in his previous role, he was handed features to code by a product manager. Now he gets to determine what he’ll be building and when he’ll deliver them. He feels a new sense of control he’s never had before.

He decided to carve out projects in weekly chunks. The term he used was “developer weeks” or “DWK.” To make that abbreviation easier to say, he says “duke.” When I heard him describe it, I think “duke” is catchy and I like the elegance of blocking out a week. Given what I’ve experienced over the years, building out a simple feature and testing the code end-to-end could take a week.

His method of planning is realistic, and tolerates random fires and injection of new features. A week is short enough yet also long enough to account for developer cycles of productivity. Sometimes Thursdays are not so great for project work because I’m bothering him to get coffee.

I like this new concept, and we’ll see in a quarter or 12 dukes what his takeaways are. He tells me he’s going to scale the system for more users, possibly sharding the database so I’d like to know how close his estimates are.

I’m happy for him and I can’t wait to discuss more as he evolves his role as a new startup engineer.