Experimenting with Shape Up

In 2019, Ryan Singer open-sourced how product development happens at Basecamp in a book called "Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters." 

In case you're not familiar with the methodology, here's a quick TL,DR:

• 6-week cycles
• Shaping the work
• Making teams responsible
• Targeting risks

At Specify, we started experimenting with the Shape Up methodology a few weeks ago to define focused projects, address unknowns, and increase collaboration and engagement within the team. So, I started to learn more about how other teams implemented it, too.

Leveraging Shape Up

Slite works in 8-week cycles

Slite runs 8-week cycles and includes a 1-week build every 2 cycles.

A Build is a project that a small team (say 2–4 people) can ship in a week.
- Christophe Pasquier, CEO at Slite

Builds interrupt the team workflow in two ways. For one, Slite is a remote-first and async team. Builds go in-person. Secondly, the product strategy focuses on eight-week cycles. Builds are a 5-day practice.

Memo Bank shapes the work for 2 weeks

Memo Bank works in 8-week cycles, too - 2 weeks of Shaping, then 6 weeks of Building. The Shaping phase doesn't occur simultaneously and includes all stakeholders, not only the product managers and lead developers.

During the 2 weeks of Shaping, the developers don't code. They still fix bugs, but their priority is the Shaping, like it is for everybody else in the company.

To focus on meaningful topics and avoid misalignments, the team created an additional meeting called "The strategy meeting." It brings together the CEO, the CTO, and the lead product manager. The objective is to decide which topics to tackle during the next Shaping phase. They review all the pitches and select the most critical ones.

Then, each developer and designer decide which percentage of their time they dedicate to the Building phase.

Raycast runs 1-day cool-down phases every week

Raycast — although it doesn’t refer to Shape Up per se — runs 4-week cycles and a 1-day cool-down phase once a week.

Every beginning of the month, we write down what we work on for the next 30 days. 
- Thomas Paul Mann, CEO at Raycast

This forces the team to make compromises and target the risk because there's only a limited amount of time and resources available.

How we leveraged Shape Up at Specify

We started experimenting with the Shape Up methodology to define focused projects, address unknowns, and increase collaboration and engagement within the team.

Principles

We split the team in 2 squads:

• The Core squad, and
• The Growth squad.

The Core squad owned the main app, and the Growth squad focused efforts on acquisition and conversion.

Each squad included 1 Product Manager, 1 Product Designer, and 1-2 Software Engineers. They had full responsibility to define their own tasks and make adjustments to the scope.

We worked in 4-week cycles:

• 3 weeks in the Building phase, and
• 1 week in the cool-down phase.

A small group including the CEO, the CTO, and the Product Manager, worked in parallel to the cycle teams to define the key elements of a solution before considering a project ready to work on.

Results: What we built in 4-week cycles

If we're still in the early weeks of this experiment with Shape Up, we already measured a positive impact.

It helped us build momentum and ship significant updates - like the Specify CLI, Configuration Templates, and the in-depth GitHub integration.

Over to you

Have you implemented Shape Up in your team? How do you apply it to your own processes? What are your best practices? I'm eager to learn how you leverage Shape Up!

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