Utilizing Cool-Down Weeks to Avoid Burnout and Improve Product Stability

The Problem of Constant Delivery Pressure

When leading product-focused engineering teams, it's easy to move from one feature to the next, often imposing optimistic deadlines. Likewise, when planning and estimating work, polish, thorough testing, and system optimization are frequently overlooked and are particularly hard to estimate accurately. The result is tight deadlines with no wiggle room for cleanup and finesse.

If hard deadlines and loose ends continue from sprint to sprint, cycle to cycle, tech debt will grow, fatigue will set in, and an engineer's cognitive load can lead to burnout.

Add to that the task of planning. It's necessary to take a moment to reset and think about the work ahead before rushing into the next body of work. The end of the previous cycle is likely the worst time to add the extra overhead of planning and estimating.

What is Cool-Down?

The idea of cool-down originally came from Basecamp's Shape Up approach to product development. In short, after three sprints or cycles (each 2 weeks long), we take a week off from the main roadmap work to clean up loose ends, improve user experience, or explore new technologies and approaches.

To pull directly from the Shape Up's description of cool-down:

... after each six-week cycle, we schedule two weeks for cool-down. This is a period with no scheduled work where we can breathe, meet as needed, and consider what to do next.

During cool-down, programmers and designers on project teams are free to work on whatever they want. After working hard to ship their six-week projects, they enjoy having time that's under their control. They use it to fix bugs, explore new ideas, or try new technical possibilities.

In Practice

While the pure idea of cool-down is to allow the team to work on "whatever they want," I have found that providing some guidance and guardrails helps to make these weeks more effective as both a cognitive break and to make real progress on cleaning up loose ends. When we took the "whatever they want" approach, we found that too much time was spent deliberating on what to work on. In that scenario, we also often saw cool-down projects leaving their own loose ends, thus adding to the problem.

We decided to add some light structure to our cool-down weeks. We started by requiring a minimal proposal for cool-down projects. This is intended to be extremely light. A project should be summarized in one to three sentences.

Next, we provided a couple of loose guidelines for picking projects. They are as follows:

• Projects should deliver or investigate some value add. Projects can be exploratory but should provide some value in the exploration output. (E.g., is implementing feature-x feasible or not)
• Cool-down projects should be able to reach a deployable or sharable state by the end of the week.

Adding these basic guidelines gave our team much flexibility to dive into work of their choosing but brought some accountability and structure. Additionally, we can roll right into cool-down while drastically changing our pace and focus to provide a much-needed breather.

The Result

With our introduction of cool-down weeks, we've seen significant improvements in team morale and product stability. Engineers appreciate having dedicated time to revisit work, address the technical debt that can build up over rapid feature cycles, and refine code that might have been rushed. This has reduced the cognitive load, as engineers are less stressed about leaving things unfinished, knowing they'll have time to polish or optimize.

On the product side, our cool-down weeks have contributed to a more stable and robust codebase. We've seen fewer issues and smoother feature releases by fixing bugs, improving code quality, and fine-tuning systems. The freedom of cool-down weeks allows our engineers to follow through on projects with a break from pressing deadlines.

In Summary

Implementing cool-down weeks has been impactful for our engineering team. By intentionally stepping back every few cycles, we create a rhythm that balances productivity with quality while also priortizing rest. Engineers have the freedom to address loose ends, explore ideas, and focus on refinement without the pressure of constant feature delivery. This time serves as a breather that mitigates burnout and reduces tech debt, enabling the team to come back refreshed and better prepared to tackle new challenges.