In short: like any method of working that is copied from one organization and pasted into another, very different organization, there are chutes and ladders. Habits and practices that will help you move faster or skip ahead outright. Anti-patterns and missteps that will set you back days and weeks.
Herein, some things I learned whilst using Shape Up over the course of a few years across teams of varied experience and specializations.
How teams succeed at Shape Up
Three practices that might help your first Shape Up projects:
The Model-T button. The first slice of your solution is crucial to success at Shape Up. I found that the more that slice was constrained, the better. I often tried to pitch the first working demo as “just a button that does the thing; you can have any button, as long as it’s black”. No ornamentation, no workflow, no layering, only a button that solves the pitched problem end-to-end without any “magic behind the curtain”. When the team quickly arrives at this milestone, it opens up the rest of their time to iterate on everything else that makes a suitable solution. And, they can do so with confidence that the big question of “can we solve this?” is already answered.
Coherent jargon leads to the good team-think. It warms my heart, a big moment of pride, when teams start using language as a tool for thinking about their project at a higher level. Even if the jargon is a little silly or requires explanation to an outsider. When teams wield conceptual compression to make sure they’re aligned on the specifics of the problem and how they’re solving it, I’m pretty sure they’re going to succeed at delivering the pitch. Even if the underlying problem or solution spaces are complicated!
Save some margin for finishing, details, socialization, delivering, etc. The most successful projects I saw left time at the end of the iteration to finish. I often called it “pencils down” time. In part, this was a breather and a milestone to let the team know they were done with the development part. It also lets them mentally shift into the mindset required for QA, fixing details, finding bugs, writing documentation, preparing release checklists, sharing changes with colleagues outside the product team, etc.
Rakes I’ve stepped on whilst Shaping Up
Three (bad) habits that could stymy your first Shape Up project:
Aligning work based on individual specialization. If all your tasks have “front-end” and “back-end” labels, you might end up with something you can’t quickly demo, iterate, and release. Related, if the first slice of your project doesn’t show an end-to-end solution, you don’t actually have your first slice. Lesson: you may need to work together more intensely, and decompose the work differently, than you do with processes that regard the work as simple queues.
Pitches and product docs so deep, you can’t see the ending from the beginning. You may need to split it up. Shape Up is, in many ways, about splitting work up more sensibly. But, if your pitch doesn’t work as independent components/solutions, you’ve got a problem! The good news is, splitting up a pitch into tasks is very similar to splitting a pitch into multiple pitches; it’s all about chasing down the dependencies, minimizing them, and thinking about how to build off existing work. Splitting up a too-large pitch is potentially a good way to practice at an essential activity of Shape Up without committing to a particular project just yet.
Pressing on with a wobbly project. Path dependence is tough. If you aren’t willing to use the Circuit Breaker on your first few projects, it becomes increasingly difficult to do so later. Without the ability to cut loose from a project that isn’t going to expectations, you’ll have lost the ability to do fixed time and scope. That’s (probably) why you looked into Shape Up in the first place. I find it important to keep in mind that Shape Up is, in part, about working with hypotheticals and options. It’s often better to stop a project that isn’t going well and move on to the next (most likely) equally promising, project.
I have a lot more to say about Shape Up! But, I like putting shorter, punchier bits out, so here we are. Please let me know what you’d like to hear more about!
