The Cookie Cutter Method: Fast Estimates for Repetitive Work

"How long is this going to take?" You look at the ticket. You look at the engineer. The engineer looks at the ceiling.

There's no shortage of estimation tools. Story points. Planning poker. Monte Carlo simulations for the particularly ambitious. They all work - in theory. They share one blind spot: they assume the project is new. But most of it isn't.

Think about what your team actually builds day to day. Integrating a new client. Rebuilding a feature on a new surface. Patching a set of servers. You've done versions of all of these before. The shape is familiar. You've just never kept a record of how long it took.

That's what the Cookie Cutter Method is for.

The idea

Break a repeatable type of project into its component tasks. For each task, estimate a minimum and a maximum delivery time. Save it somewhere sensible. That's it.

Next time a similar project arrives, you open the template, adjust for a few variables, and have a defensible answer in under five minutes. No planning poker. No collective ceiling-staring.

An example

In the games and VR space, teams regularly create 3D environments inspired by the real world. New project, same basic shape. Every time.

Ideation

• Reference gathering: finding real-world images to inspire the look
• Concepts: low-fidelity drawings for early alignment

Design

• White-box: a rough 3D wireframe to establish scale
• Module planning: deciding which 3D models are needed
• Material exploration: finding the right textures

Development

• Final models: building the objects
• Skybox: sourcing the sky around the environment
• Light pass: making light and shadows read correctly

Polish

• Optimisation: compressing the scene so it loads quickly
• Audio: sourcing the soundtrack

Each task has a range - a fast version and a slow version. You're not pretending the work is perfectly predictable. You're capturing what you already know from experience.

Cookie cutting

A simple spreadsheet is all you need. *in days per person

Easy peasy. In this example, the project lands somewhere between one and four months.

And now the interesting conversations can start: do we have enough people? Do we have the right people? Is the scope realistic? You're not scrambling for an answer any more. You're leading the conversation.

Greasing the mould

You're probably thinking: this only works if every project is identical. It doesn't have to be. Here's where the template stretches:

• Complexity. Is this version harder than usual? Say, 50% harder. Increase the min and max accordingly. Simple as that.
• Volume. You need one beach chair. Now you also need a table, an umbrella, and a glass with a slice of pineapple. Account for how many things you're actually making, and which are fast or slow to build.
• Dependencies. Who can work on what, and when? Cookie Cutter estimates don't replace delivery planning - sequencing, critical paths, capacity. You still need that conversation. But now you have numbers to bring into it.

Will it give you a perfect estimate? Sorry, no. Nothing does. But you'll have a range in five minutes, one you can defend, and a conversation you can actually shape. That's usually enough.

Filipe Albero Pomar is an engineering manager and speaker based in London. He writes about AI adoption, engineering leadership, and software delivery. Find him at alpomar.dev.

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