The Ledger, every show

“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…”

“The other thing I've seen is when the team is just continuously delivering meaningful things, it doesn't have to line up. Because from the executive level, if you are CPO or CTO, or I mean, in these bigger cases, it's more like, you know, VP in some area, but …”

“The thing is that, like, I would say if you have a feature factory, meaning you're continually cranking out features, you're probably quite healthy. All you need to do is feed a different input to the beginning of the factory, right? What most teams are strugg…”

“Every designer codes. Imagine if every designer codes and not, and I don't just mean HTML. I mean, like running the app locally, going into the place where that view is rendered to make that thing look the way that they want it to look or whatever. Right. I me…”

“Imagine you have no sales org. You have no marketing. That all of sales, sales, selling and marketing is happening by the unicorn founders. So it means that there isn't contention for engineering time, that there isn't kind of like all these different sources …”

“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?”

“When it comes to feature development or, you know, building something that's going to be needy enough to sell, you know, then there's very few things that are going to be a substantial value add to a product that you can do in two weeks.”

“We had this principle at base camp, which was this notion of the circuit breaker. Like if a project is not on track to actually finish after the six weeks, we're just going to cancel it and rethink, you know, almost no teams have the stomach for that.”

“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.”

“The dominant failure case that I see in the real world is always again and again, not enough detail. And it's also the most common failure mode where the engineers run back to the product folks and say, I'm not getting enough from you.”

“In a shaping session, you can't collaborate on, on, on something so high fidelity, right? And so we need also some ways to collaborate, and this is where you see these techniques in the book like breadboarding and fat marker sketching. These are tools to help …”

“The person who's writing the ticket doesn't actually understand the work that's involved. You know what I mean? So there are so many unknowns and time bombs waiting in those tickets that sound reasonable, but they weren't really created by the person who under…”

“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…”

“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?”

“Even when we were building V one, David wasn't actually full-time as the, as our only technical person. He was programming 10 hours a week.”

“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…”

“What we can do is say, we're not going to keep reinvesting in something that we don't understand, you know? So let's take this out of build mode and bring this back into shaping mode”

“When there's a lot of solutioning all the way down to detail without engineering involved, usually that's a painful recipe, you know, and then it's kind of like, no, we can't do that.”

“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.”

“It's after they hired the first PM, after they hired the second PM and maybe even the third, you know, and they're kind of getting to like the product and engineering together are like 30, 50 people, you know, and it's like, we thought we put everybody in the …”

“I really think, honestly, I think it starts the first project where For example, the founding engineers hands off and then the new hire is, is taking over responsibility or the person who was like sort of founder slash CEO is like first giving it to a PM to ki…”

“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 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 …”