Shape Up, Before Shaping there's a Chaos
Shape Up, Before Shaping there's a Chaos
It is one of the articles in the Shape Up series.
For Table of Contents go to: How to make Shape Up successful?
In the previous article, we looked at different levels of describing the work to be done. Now, let’s think for a while if there is something before the Shaping.
Shaping from top-of-the-head
After reading the book, the common thing about the Shaping process is simply focusing on writing the Pitch.
The result is to have a well-described Jira Epic (in terms of the concept, not the tool being used) structured with a basic Pitch template from the book (Problem, Appetite, Solution, Rabbit Holes), with no stories and no tasks inside.
That’s enough to move it to the Betting Table and Building.
It is often a great starting point, and I recommend doing so.
This article will discuss how you may evolve this process after some time.
Ryan Signer’s take on Framing
Recently, the author of Shape Up shared his experiences coaching various teams about the process of Shaping. According to his writing, some teams added the Framing step to the whole process.
You can see it in this LinkedIn post by Ryan Singer and in this article on his blog.
Makes sense and complicates a little
After you read an article linked above, you may feel like it makes a lot of sense - and it does.
Once you get to the last paragraph of Ryan’s writing, you may feel a bit lost in putting these things in order. Remember, it is his experience from coaching specific teams. It is not a part of the Shape Up book yet. Try to think about it on your own.
In my writing below, I will describe things which may happen before Shaping without giving it a name.
Two activities before Shaping
I see two things that you need to think about before the Shaping.
Thinking, researching, describing, and narrowing down the opportunity (e.g. problem).
Gathering all the chaotic data, which may help you prepare the Pitch.
These two steps may happen sequentially or in parallel, depending on the opportunity you are approaching. Sometimes, they will occur sequentially in one order and sometimes in another.
Thinking about the opportunity
While the process of Shaping produces the Pitch, which contains the Problem and often the Solution; that’s worth explicitly separating the moment of thinking about the Opportunity/Problem.
We can solve many things for our customers; we can name them differently and split them differently.
If you want to understand this step more, I strongly recommend reading Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres. Just read the book. It is great. I will not describe it better than Teresa did.
Gathering all the chaotic data inputs
This activity is about stepping backwards and not jumping straight into Problem or Solution space.
Remember the first paragraph of this article? I mentioned writing the Pitch with the knowledge we have on top of our heads. Often this strategy is similar to the HiPPO prioritisation method when we assume that we can process most of the knowledge in a single brain and put it into some long writing form.
We can approach it differently by gathering all the possible data sources, which may help us in the Shaping process. It might be:
All the research data,
Notes from customer interviews,
Data analytics and tracking data about the behaviour of our users,
Customer Support Team feedback,
NPS score around specific already available features,
Feedback delivered via social media.
Market research,
Analysis of similar solutions of our competitors.
All the data sources that you can imagine.
Then you put this chaotic information on a single Miro board.
Shaping is about tidying up the Chaos
Once we are done with all the considerations and gathering the data - we can proceed to Shaping.
Now, our job is to take this Chaos, work on it, and by Shaping, convert it into a Pitch.
In the next article, finally, we will jump into the Building phase.