Autistic founders hold on to the problem and let the solution keep changing

Christina Chun answered the opening account of autistic cognition with a qualification and then a method. Dr Sharon Zivkovic had just told the Sydney panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in June 2024 that most autistic people are bottom up thinkers. Chun said the description fitted her only partially, because autistic people are all different. She agreed with the part about bottom up thinking, and said what it looked like in her own work. “we focus on the problem and we don’t get attached to the solution,” she said, because the solution always evolves.

Her method was agile development, which she said she loved, run in two week sprints. In each sprint the team prepares what it wants to build, does not change course, and builds as intensely as possible. Underneath the sprints is a road map of what might be built over the next four, six or eight weeks. And someone close to burnout, she said, can take the next two weeks offline. In her view the arrangement balances predictability and structure with feedback. Her account follows the published method closely. The Scrum Guide, the 2020 statement of the framework by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, describes sprints as fixed length events of one month or less, during which no changes are made that would endanger the sprint goal, while the longer list of what the product needs keeps emerging. The best thing about the autistic brain, she said, is that it is not tied to a solution and is constantly looking for feedback, addressing customer needs by listening to what people need and want and pushing that back into product development.