The seed for Sled Team was planted quite a few years ago.

When I was starting out in my first Real Job, almost nobody in management knew how to run a project. The way they hit their deadlines was by pushing their employees to work huge amounts of unpaid overtime. I routinely worked 100 hours a week, and was only at home to sleep.

For a while this was okay. It was even kind of exciting! Eventually, though, even the hardest workers crack. Two-thirds of our team developed stress-related injuries like RSI and ulcers. My back seized up, and I was carried away from my desk on a stretcher.

Several years later, I found myself managing a huge, time-sensitive project. I resolved that I wasn't going to blow it like my former boss had, and I wasn't going to burn out my team. We got some project management software, broke everything down into small tasks, and then went through and estimated every single one. I built this gigantic Gantt chart, committed to a date six months away, felt incredibly confident and proud of myself, and we set off on the project.

After a week, we were already late, and it kept getting worse. Our estimates were optimistic. People got sick. We were all working unpaid overtime. We pushed back our date. We pushed it back again. We finally finished, but it was nothing like what we'd imagined at the start.

Humbled by the experience, I tried to do better on subsequent projects. We tried to estimate better, and were still wrong. We tried doubling our dates, and were still late.

We learned about agile methods, and adopted Scrum. It sort of helped! But we rarely finished all the tasks we committed to in a sprint.

We tried Kanban. It was pretty good, and helped us understand where we were getting stuck! But we didn't know how to use it to predict completion dates.

There was also a ton of cognitive overhead in using these techniques, a ton of ambiguity, and all kinds of opportunities for people to disagree on how it should work, and waste time arguing about it.

And our tools often didn't help. Either they were difficult to use and slow, or they didn't give us any visibility, or they required a full-time employee just to set them up and maintain them.

So with all this backstory, and many years of observing the amount of human misery that is generated when you don't know when things will be done, we wrote down the following:

• What if we could strip everything down to the bare essentials?
• What if we could make this stuff simple enough that anybody could use it, with no training?
• What if there weren't a ton of options to pick from and to fight over?
• What if we could push information to you when you needed it, instead of expecting you to notice it on your own?
• What if you never had to estimate anything ever again?
• What if computers could do all this work for you, rather than you working for the computers?

We've spent a lot of time observing these problems, and we've been frustrated with the shortcomings of the solutions that exist.

Sled Team is an attempt to do better, because you deserve better, and your customers deserve better.

Thanks for coming along on this experiment!

—Evan