Shape Up, Introduction

It is one of the articles in the Shape Up series.

For Table of Contents go to: How to make Shape Up successful?

Basecamp

Shape Up is a book written by Ryan Singer. It is a product development methodology.

Shape Up is for product development teams who struggle to ship. If you’ve thought to yourself, “Why can’t we ship like we used to?” or “I never have enough time to think about strategy”, then this book can help.

– Official Website of Shape Up

Read the book first

This series of articles shares my thoughts on the implementation of Shape Up. Based on my past experiences as a software developer, project manager, scrum master, product owner and engineering manager. I do not provide the perfect recipe for your company, but I may inspire you and highlight the challenges upfront. I also mention techniques from the other frameworks/methods you may try to apply within Shape Up

As I want to extend the topic, I try not to repeat the book.

Please read the book first - it is free, short, essential and pleasant to read.

Table of Contents

ToC below is my current understanding of what I want to cover. It may change over time, but it’ll eventually be consistent.

1. Introduction

2. When not to follow the book

3. Shaping vs Building

4. Shaping

   1. Who does the Shaping?

   2. Are Pitches the problems to solve?

   3. Before Shaping there’s a Chaos

5. Building, when Pitches get converted into Projects:

   1. Composing the teams

   2. How to do a Project Kickoff?

   3. Project Leadership and Project Roles

   4. Planning the execution - For what?

   5. Planning the execution - How?

   1. Focusing on feedback and early testing

   2. Scope changes

   3. Monitoring the progress

   4. Release models

   5. Project closure

6. Cooldown:

   1. Finishing projects during the cooldown

   2. Transparency

7. Structure and add-ons:

   1. Length and the first day of the cycle

   2. Async, sync, written, verbal

   3. Supporting your users

   4. Reporting to the board/stakeholders

   5. Composition of the teams

   6. Little product improvements

8. More on Shaping:

   1. Modern product discovery

   2. Strategy and road mapping

   3. Big projects

   4. Not everything is a Shape Up project

9. Shape Up at scale

Credits

The series consists of my thoughts on the topic and my past experiences. However, there are a few people who influenced it:

• Thank you, Surfer SEO Team, for the environment, your support and ideas in playing around with various methods within Shape Up.

• Thank you, Lucjan Suski, for coming up with the idea for Shape Up’s implementation at Surfer.

• Thank you, Ryan Singer, for sharing writing the book and making the next big step in closing the gap between discovery and delivery.

• And all the people who taught me to use common sense in the agile world.

Disclaimer: This is a series of my thoughts. People mentioned above may have different opinions on this topic. They most likely disagree with me in many cases, just as I agree and disagree with them.

Read next

We start by discussing: When not to follow the book?

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