The Hill Chart

The “Hill Chart” is one of my favorite ways to represent the progress of work. This concept originated from Jason Fried and the team at 37signals.

I don’t trust percentage completions. I want to know how the team feels about the work. The Hill Chart helps clarify that progress. It’s a representation of the team’s collective intuition, knowledge, and experience. And you can’t represent that with a percentage.

Work is like a hill. There’s work required to figure things out (uphill) and then make it happen (downhill). The Hill Chart is a visual representation of that distinction, which is important to understand progress.

Each independent scope of work is tracked as a dot on the hill. This is a built-in feature of Basecamp, but this visualization can be used anywhere. I’ve used tools like FigJam and Whimsical boards to create Hill Charts. You could even sketch it on a piece of paper (I have!).

Hill Charts spark conversation and ignite curiosity. They help the team conceptualize the work and have real discussions to identify and resolve the unknowns. This isn’t about trying to determine a completion percentage. Being at the top of the hill does not mean you’re 50% through the work. You can have 99 out of 100 tasks complete, but the last one could be riddled with unknowns and complexity. And there could be several undiscovered tasks.

Even when I’m not using Basecamp to track the work, I always come back to Hill Charts as the best method to understand where the work really stands.