Author of Shape Up, Fractional CPO, 20+ Years in Design, Code, Management, prev: Head of Strategy at 37signals
I get this question all the time. Look at whatever doc you're making in the shaping phase (eg a "pitch" per the book or something else) and ask yourself: What am I trying to do with this doc? Am trying to get approval with this? Or
Here's a new case study, showing a project end-to-end. It's about 30 minutes, and you'll see every step from choosing the initial idea through framing, shaping, and building. Pay special attention to how different roles are involved at different stages, and how
I see some common pitfalls when people try to do Shape Up "by the book." There are things in the book that are Basecamp-specific or often misunderstood, and teams who successfully adopt Shape Up route around them.
Igor writes: "Our product is 15 years old, with a lot of legacy code and outdated technologies. Our engineers say that the minimum time they need to ship anything of real value (not just small things) is about three months...
On relying on each others' expertise instead of trying to pull everyone into the same work.
On how to weigh the impact when we've gathered too many inputs to choose from.
Here's the PDF file of the presentation to download. PDF of the "Bootstrap the Conversation" Presentation bootstrap presentation model.pdf 454 KB download-circle
We're excited to announce the sixth (wow!) cohort of Shaping in Real Life, coming in October. I like to keep in touch with our alumni. Last week I talked to a senior PM from our previous cohort who just got promoted to CPO. She was telling me about
Different moments in the company call for green-lighting different projects. What counts as "impactful" depends on what we're trying to do.
A founder came to me with questions about his team's results adopting Shape Up. Some projects were knockouts. They got exactly what they wanted done, when they wanted it done. But other projects dragged on, stuck at the last yard line. What was going on?
Shaping isn't writing. It's not filling out a template or creating a document. It's getting to that "a-ha" moment together where the parts crystalize and we have something that will work. (Plus an example of how messy a real shaping session looks.)
Questions about roadmaps, betting at the last minute, iterations, and how shipping what we intended is like driving a car.
The recent wave of layoffs reveals something tricky about the notion of "empowered" product teams. There's a missing ingredient that seems to separate the teams who get cut from the teams who survive.
Here is the Excalidraw template for mapping time spent in different rooms. Time mapping template Time mapping template.excalidraw 446 KB download-circle
La Product Conf shared the video from my recent talk in Paris: "Scaling Shape Up Beyond Bootstrapped Companies."