Shape Up

“What I started to learn pretty early on is that people don't like to talk about their struggles shipping. Especially, you know, CPOs and CTOs don't like to go on a public forum and say, our company isn't shipping, or our engineering team is stuck, or our team …”

“Honestly, there are so few teams that are structured just like base camp that there are a lot of gaps in the book of like, well, what about this? And what about that? And how do we do that in our situation?”

“We found that six weeks is kind of the maximum that we can see into the future where we could actually say like, how do we work backward and figure out something we could build in that six weeks and really land it, you know?”

“Instead, we want to have a whole idea, give it to a team. So they see the whole, they really understand it. Right. And then they can come up with their tasks and they can figure out how to track that and break it into pieces so they can actually take more resp…”

“Is that if you want that reality of the team happily buzzing and humming like a, you know, like some happy bee colony, you know, for this six weeks, they need to have a lot more clarity around what's the thing that we're solving, right? And so when we start wo…”

“If we think of six weeks as a maximum, that's going to force us to ask some really good questions to ourselves about where do we actually, what piece of this do we really think we can land? Because if you try to say, you know, in six months, we're going to shi…”

“It can function in very large companies. We have, for example I have some friends at a at a they're a what is it called? They're doing clinical trials. So they're in the pharmaceutical industry. And I mean, the companies, you know, thousands of people, and it'…”

“If it's shaped well, you can usually describe it in less than 10 moving pieces.”

“If it's if it's more than 10, then you just get into ticket land of here's a million things I have to do. You know what I mean? If you have a hundred things, it's like, that doesn't tell me anything, but if it has to be nine or less, you know.”

“And shape up teams when they hit their stride is that the PM moves upstream. So the PM is less busy with how do I get this project to like not be in a bad state when it's getting built? And they're way more in how do I understand the business context? How do I…”

“Before the problem definition, there's this question of like, what's the demand? Where are people struggling? Where is really the place The itch they're trying to scratch, you know, and then a lot of the shape up stuff is kind of when I have something where I …”

“What ends up happening is, is that when people try to try something new on something really critical and it doesn't work, they will never try it again. They've just like, they've destroyed all future opportunities to try this again because everyone knows how b…”

“It's typically small teams inside larger companies that experiment with this. And sometimes it spreads and sometimes it doesn't.”

“One approach I found that works better is Pick a reasonable sounding appetite and just explore the two to three options around it. Pick six weeks and then say, what would we do differently if we only had four weeks or eight weeks? And you'll kind of naturally …”

“I think that rigor, like the rigor they applied to that across the board, you need to do it all the way. You can't adopt the process halfway, I think is the challenge. Otherwise you end up with people shipping like milestone one and then moving on, which is no…”

“So we ended up going with the base camp motto of ShapeUp with a six-week sprint, and that's worked out really well for us so far in terms of getting into a rhythm of building out feature requests and having the engineers also feel that it's a short enough peri…”