You have two types of work, the imagined work and the discovered work.
Imagined work is the work you imagine while you dream up your feature, product or scope. Thinks you think you might need to do in order to achieve your goals.
Discovered work is work you find whilst working on the imagined work. This discovered work is the most volatile and sometimes even the majority of the work. Besides bringing uncertainty, it’s harder to report on this discovered work.
One can quickly iterate over versions using a walking skeleton to find discovered work.
This goes hand-in-hand with Stages can be known or unknown. Not to confuse with growth work which is indeed another type of work, but also a different categorization.
Reference
Knuth, L. (2023, June 2). Work in an efficient team. https://lknuth.dev/writings/efficient_team/
Highlights or timestamps
- Discovered work is work what is found out starting with the imagined work. This is the majority of the work and higher value as you’re actually making the thing.
— ^1738ae from Work in an efficient team
- To quickly discover work, a fast approach is used to quickly ship iterations and versions.
— ^dc2433 from Work in an efficient team