Golazo
Summary
Golazo is a lightweight engineering methodology for small and mid-sized teams that attacks common delivery friction: rework hidden in code reviews, slow feedback loops, knowledge silos, multitasking overload, and fragile ownership patterns. It constrains the amount of parallel tasks, front‑loads shared understanding with tiny design docs, prioritizes by value, and closes the loop with explicit customer validation. Regular retrospectives ensure that every piece of the process has a net positive return on investment.
Golazo keeps teams fast and sane by making work small, visible, collaboratively understood early, and finished with real validation. It trades batch size and premature isolation for flow, shared context, and adaptability, yielding fewer surprises, faster merges, and happier engineers even when working in different timezones.
Who It’s For
- Teams wanting predictable throughput
- In-person, hybrid, or asynchronous teams aiming to reduce meeting load and handoff friction through stronger async collaboration (small shared design docs + visible flow)
- Small to medium product or platform groups (≈4–10 engineers)
- Teams looking to do more with less while reducing incident rate and code review debates
- Orgs seeking higher morale and faster new‑hire ramp
What Makes It Different
- Collaborative design upfront: Lightweight design doc and 2 signoffs before implementation
- Work In Progress limits to maximize focus and completion rate
- Visual flow board with priority rails (Swarm / Interrupt / Planned) for instant situational awareness
- Small, value‑sliced tickets and Weighted Shortest Job First planning enable rapid adaptation mid-cycle
- Integrated review loop: smaller code reviews focused on detail, not architecture debates
- Shared ownership: Anyone can pull any Ready ticket so knowledge spreads naturally
- Lower defect rates through quality gates: Design review catches issues early, Work In Progress limits enable swarm response to incidents, and small batch sizes reduce integration risks
- Higher morale and faster onboarding: Autonomy to pull work, pairing for knowledge transfer, collaborative design, and shared ownership reduce frustration and accelerate new-hire productivity
- Living library of concise design docs builds durable, searchable team context which informs future decisions, reduces single‑expert risk, and powers AI assistants with high‑fidelity context
- Customer Validation as a distinct stage; Done means value observed, not just code merged
Inspiration
Golazo builds on many great industry ideas including these specific books:
- "Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash" by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
- "The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development" by Donald G. Reinertsen
- "Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business" by David J. Anderson
- "The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses" by Eric Ries
Suggested Reading Path
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