Break down complex problems
Slice small increments
Create continuous streams of value
Elephant Carpaccio is an exercise developed by Alistair Cockburn that demonstrates how large requirements can be broken down into very small, value-delivering implementation steps. Through short iterations, a working application emerges step by step. The focus is not on the technical solution, but on the ability to slice features in a way that continuously produces usable results and enables fast feedback.
Participants work in small teams on a shared task and ship their first working results within minutes. Each iteration is planned, built, presented and reflected upon. This makes the typical challenges of software development immediately tangible: How small is small enough? What actually creates value? Which decisions turn out to be suboptimal in hindsight?
The exercise regularly leads to surprising insights about what can be achieved in a short time — and how much the way work is sliced shapes a team's success.
We facilitate the Elephant Carpaccio Kata with your team, your organisation or the participants of your event. Teams work in pairs. Each tandem decides for itself how to approach the problem — from pair programming and test-driven development to AI-assisted coding or even spreadsheets.
The kata creates a shared learning space where participants from very different backgrounds work together. Developers, business stakeholders, product owners and end users experience collectively how large requirements become small, valuable increments. This generates not only domain insights, but new perspectives on collaboration, feedback and iterative product development.
The format works equally well as a standalone workshop or as a session at conferences, team events, community gatherings or in-house training days. It scales from small groups to several dozen participants and can be flexibly adapted to your audience, context and available time.
We recommend a minimum of 2.5 hours. Larger time slots allow for additional rounds of reflection, deeper dives and the transfer of insights into everyday practice.
Want to run the Elephant Carpaccio Kata yourself? Feel free to use our compact handout in the European variant with adapted countries, currencies and tax rates:
Elephant Carpaccio for your team or event
Want to run the kata as a workshop, conference session or team event? Let's find the right format for your audience and context.
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