How to make Shape Up successful?

Rafal Makara
Jan 05, 2023
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Whenever I join a new team using Shape Up, I see most of them fall into the same traps. I share ideas in this series of articles that put a different perspective on the original book's content.

Combining the knowledge from the book and this series will make your implementation of Shape Up successful.

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?

    6. Focusing on feedback and early testing

    7. Scope changes

    8. Monitoring the progress

    9. Release models

    10. 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