Introduction to the Projects Framework

At Circuit, we build, market, and collect feedback on our products using a process we refer to as the "Projects Framework".

The Projects Framework is a set of processes that, when followed, help us to effectively scope and build a product feature, market it to customers, and collect feedback.

It does this by ensuring:

• We're all working from the same shared context
• There are allocated decision-makers for tough questions during the building phase
• There’s a process for sharing product information with marketing, sales, and support.
• There’s a place to share feedback from customers

The Projects Framework exists to allow us to scale our ability to build, market, and learn.

It enables us to work on many things at once, without bottlenecks. It removes dedicated project managers from the process, and distributes decision-making ability to the designers and engineers working to solve a particular problem.

<aside> ℹ️ The Projects Framework is our replacement for Scrum.

It’s a lighter, more autonomous, and more async replacement that’s only used when building something complex enough to require some additional alignment.

</aside>

The process can be broken down into 2 distinct stages: building, and post-building.

Building

The two most important parts of a building stage are the Shared Context, and the allocated decision-maker(s).

Shared Context (1-pager)

The project's shared context comes in the form of a 1-pager and or Loom that explains the problem space and our approach to a solution (WHY loom). The 1-pager is a 200-500 word document that concisely explains what we're building, what we're not building (where the scope ends), and why we're building it.

Everyone contributing to this project should first read the 1-pager, and use the information found there to help frame their decisions.