A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up")

Summary

In Lenny's Podcast episode featuring Ryan Singer, the creator of "Shape Up," listeners explore a transformative approach to product development that emphasizes collaboration, efficient use of engineering time, and strategic shaping sessions. Ryan, having spent years at 37 Signals, draws from his experience to illustrate how small, agile teams can effectively plan and execute projects by focusing on fixed timeframes and collaborative decision-making. This approach aims to keep projects on track, reduce unnecessary meetings, and enhance team engagement, offering a refreshing perspective compared to traditional agile methodologies like Scrum.

Highlights

• Ryan Singer explains the Shape Up process, which focuses on defining clear project scopes to meet business timelines. 🤓
• The concept of 'appetite over deadline' is introduced to prioritize effective project management. ⏰
• Collaborative shaping sessions are key, involving multiple stakeholders to address potential challenges early. 🤜🤛
• Shape Up encourages redefining traditional roles, allowing for greater integration between design and engineering. 🎨💻
• The podcast discusses the challenges of applying Shape Up outside of Basecamp's unique environment. 🌍
• The importance of clear framing and shaping to avoid projects that drag on without a clear end is stressed. 🚦

Key Takeaways

• Shape Up emphasizes planning with a clear end in mind, avoiding projects with undefined scopes. 🧠
• Teams work backward from a fixed time frame, ensuring that projects match the business's timeline and appetite. ⏳
• Successful shaping involves intense collaborative sessions to define project scopes and solve potential problems beforehand. 🤝
• Designers and engineers learn to work more collaboratively, often blurring traditional role boundaries. 🎨🔧
• A well-shaped project is one where the entire team can visualize and understand the work needed, improving efficiency and reducing misunderstandings. 👀
• Not every company can work exactly like Basecamp; adaptation of methods is important for individual organizational needs. 🏢

Overview

In this insightful podcast, Ryan Singer delves into the innovative methodologies of product development described in his book "Shape Up." He introduces listeners to a system that empowers teams to plan, build, and complete projects efficiently by focusing on the concept of 'appetite over deadline.' This involves determining how much time a project deserves and shaping it accordingly, ensuring that the team's efforts align with business objectives.

The discussion highlights the importance of collaborative shaping sessions that gather input from engineers, product designers, and other key stakeholders. These sessions are crucial for mapping out the optimal path to project completion, allowing teams to address potential roadblocks ahead of time and ensuring everyone has a clear understanding of the project's scope and goals.

Despite the successes seen at Basecamp, Ryan acknowledges that not all companies may find it straightforward to implement Shape Up as is. He emphasizes the need for adaptation based on specific organizational needs and challenges, suggesting that while not every feature of Shape Up can be universally applied, its principles can guide significant improvements in how teams manage and complete their projects.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and the Importance of Planning The chapter draws an analogy between planning in home renovation and product development. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the foundational aspects, such as whether there is electricity in a wall before designing features like lamps. This highlights how overlooking practical constraints can affect cost and timelines. It stresses the need for all stakeholders—engineers, product managers, and designers—to be aligned and fully understand the foundational requirements in a planning session before proceeding with development.
• 00:30 - 01:30: The Maximum Time Approach and Introductions of Guests This chapter discusses the concept of a 'Maximum Time Approach' for project planning, where instead of starting with a large concept and estimating its completion time, the process reverses to determine the maximum allowable time for task completion. It emphasizes creating ideas that fit within the business's predefined time constraints. Ryan Singer, an early hire at 37signals, is introduced as a guest and presumably shares insights on this method.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Ryan Singer's Background and Shape Up Method This chapter introduces Ryan Singer, highlighting his extensive experience at Basecamp and 37signals, where he contributed to building products for over 17 years. It focuses on his book 'Shape Up,' which proposes a unique methodology for software development. Unlike traditional methods that adhere strictly to deadlines, Singer advocates for a flexible 'appetite' approach that emphasizes collaboration among design, engineering, and product teams during the planning phase, rather than heavily relying on formalized design documents. Additionally, the chapter touches on the growing adoption of the 'Shape Up' method, especially in the context of evolving AI-driven transformations in product development workflows.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Deep Dive into Shape Up Method This chapter dives into the "Shape Up" method, providing a comprehensive guide on how teams can implement it to improve product shipping problems. The episode acknowledges contributions from Des trainer Bob mea and Chris spec for their input on questions and topics. The chapter also encourages listeners to subscribe to the podcast or the newsletter for exclusive content.
• 03:30 - 05:00: Introduction of Guest Ryan Singer and Methodology Discussion The chapter introduces guest Ryan Singer and discusses the methodology behind certain technical implementations. It highlights the importance of incorporating enterprise features such as SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning, which can be facilitated by Work OS, a tool designed to streamline this process for SaaS applications. The discussion emphasizes making these integrations fast and painless, catering to the growing needs of enterprise customers.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Interest in Shape Up and Historical Context The chapter provides insights into the foundational aspects of work OS, highlighting how user-friendly APIs facilitate rapid product development, enabling companies to quickly introduce new features. It mentions the wide adoption of work OS among well-known companies such as Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. Additionally, the chapter discusses work OS's acquisition of Warrant, a company specializing in advanced authorization solutions. Warrant's technology is rooted in Zanzibar, a sophisticated system originally created for Google's infrastructure, supporting services like Google Docs and YouTube.
• 06:00 - 07:00: Challenges of Adoption and Real-Life Constraints The chapter discusses the challenges encountered when adopting new systems, particularly in the context of role-based access control and enterprise features such as single sign-on or user management. Work OS is highlighted as a solution that addresses these challenges by enabling fast authorization checks at scale while being adaptable to complex use cases. It is presented as a viable alternative to Op Zero, supporting up to a million monthly active users for free, and is promoted as a resource for those designing these systems.
• 07:00 - 08:00: Risks and Failures in Development Process In this chapter, the focus is on the challenges and potential pitfalls that can occur during the development process of a product, particularly emphasizing the role of integrations. Integrations are often seen as a cumbersome aspect of product development that product leaders might dread, as they can be complex to scope, build, launch, and maintain. However, companies like Merge are dedicated to simplifying this process, offering solutions that allow businesses to launch numerous product integrations in a short span of time, transforming what might be a quarterly project into something accomplished in weeks. This illustrates the evolving landscape of B2B SaaS where tools and services are increasingly focused on streamlining and optimizing integrated solutions.
• 08:00 - 09:00: Potential Pitfalls and Understanding Project Scope Organizations such as Ramp and Electric utilize Merge to access various types of data, including accounting, file storage, and HRIS data, for tasks such as reconciling bill payments, creating searchable databases, and managing employee access. Merge offers a solution for obtaining AI-ready data quickly, making it an effective tool for solving integration challenges. The chapter suggests booking a meeting with Merge to address such dilemmas.
• 09:00 - 10:00: Product Development and Time Management The chapter begins with a mention of a $50 Amazon gift card being merged, possibly as a promotional strategy or reward for participation. Lenny Ryan, a guest on the podcast, is introduced and thanked for his presence. There is an emphasis on the excitement and anticipation for the episode, indicating that it promises to be legendary. The discussion is likely to focus on alternative methods of working beyond popular frameworks like Agile, SAFe, and Scrum, sparking interest in exploring different and innovative approaches.
• 10:00 - 11:00: Comparison with Scrum and Agile In the chapter titled 'Comparison with Scrum and Agile,' the discussion highlights the growing interest in exploring different ways of working, particularly in the context of AI and constant change. There is a focus on understanding the 'Shape Up' methodology, discussing its potential benefits, implementation strategies, and common challenges. The aim is to provide an authentic view of how product teams are functioning and to aid individuals in deciding if this approach suits them.
• 11:00 - 12:00: Real-Life Application of Shape Up The chapter discusses the growing interest in the Shape Up methodology since its release in 2019. The speaker notes that more companies are expressing interest in Shape Up, indicating that its popularity is gradually increasing. This trend is often observed during interactions with other companies.
• 12:00 - 13:00: Team Configurations and Shaping Sessions The chapter discusses the challenges faced by teams in shipping products and how people, particularly executives like CPOs and CTOs, are hesitant to talk about their struggles in public forums. It highlights the reluctance of these individuals to admit their companies' shortcomings in areas such as being stuck, not shipping products, or losing focus. This reluctance stems from the difficulty and discomfort in addressing such issues in a community setting.
• 13:00 - 14:00: The Role of Product Managers in Shape Up In the chapter titled 'The Role of Product Managers in Shape Up,' the discussion centers around the challenges product managers face in their roles. The speaker mentions the difficulty of acknowledging and sharing failures within product teams. To encourage openness, the podcast introduces a segment called 'failure corner' where participants discuss times when things didn't go well, highlighting that the process isn't always smooth and easy. The conversation acknowledges that the product management field is challenging, with no perfect blueprint or school to follow.
• 14:00 - 15:00: Differences between Basecamp and Other Companies This chapter discusses the different product development methodologies and how Basecamp differs from typical approaches. Unlike most companies that follow methodologies like Scrum, Agile, Safe, or Waterfall, Basecamp adopts its unique approach known as 'Shape Up.' The conversation highlights the struggle of finding resources or experts in product management and the limited options that are typically taught or written about. The chapter emphasizes Basecamp's departure from conventional methods, offering a distinctive perspective on product development.
• 15:00 - 16:00: Consulting Work and Application of Shape Up This chapter discusses the consulting work related to the implementation of the 'Shape Up' methodology. It begins with a conversation highlighting the limited options recognized by companies, such as Scrum and Kanban. However, 'Shape Up' is introduced as an alternative framework. The methodology is initially thought to be closely associated with Basecamp, but the discussion unfolds to reveal its applicability to a broader range of companies that are not necessarily like Basecamp. The author reflects on the surprise and discovery of 'Shape Up' being suitable for such different organizational contexts, beyond the initial expectations when the book was written.
• 16:00 - 17:00: Advices for Companies and Final Thoughts The chapter reflects on the challenges and learning experiences within the company Basecamp over 15 years. It highlights the initial decision to write a book about their journey to provide insights to others facing similar issues. The focus was on formalizing work processes to integrate new team members efficiently and maintain agility. Their internal struggles and growth are discussed to offer advice and final thoughts to other companies.
• 17:00 - 17:30: Conclusion and Final Remarks The chapter 'Conclusion and Final Remarks' reflects on the author's journey of engagement with the outside world, catalyzed by the release of their book. The publication served as a valuable tool that allowed them to connect and have insightful conversations with people from various companies, each with unique attributes distinct from their own company, such as VC-funded entities or larger organizations with different pressures, team structures, and skillsets. Despite these differences, these interactions have been enlightening and highlighted new perspectives, along with raising many questions.

A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up") Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I often use this analogy of like if you're doing a home renovation you can have like the most beautiful rendering of the new bedroom and we're going to have these lamps on the side of the bed that are coming out from the wall but if you haven't checked if there's electricity in that wall there or not it's going to drastically change the cost and the time and everything what we need to do in a in a shaping session is we come out with some kind of diagram where Engineers product and design they're saying we understand that so the first thing is we are not going to start
• 00:30 - 01:00 something unless we can see the end from the beginning we're not going to take a big concept and then say what's the estimate for this thing we're going to go the other way around and we're going to say what is the maximum amount of time we're willing to go before we actually finish something how do we come up with a idea that's going to work in the amount of time that the business is interested in spending today my guest is Ryan Singer Ryan was one of the first few hires at 37 signals and and through his
• 01:00 - 01:30 experience of building Base Cam and a 17 years of building products at 37 signals he wrote a book called shape up which shares a very different approach to building software appetites instead of deadlines a big focus on bringing design engine product together into a room to shape the plan versus writing long VDS or trying to finalize designs before you start building I've noticed more and more teams adopting the shape up method and especially with AI starting to change how we work in build product there's a shift coming in how product
• 01:30 - 02:00 teams will operate and so I thought this was the perfect time to do a deep dive into the shape up method this episode is basically going to give you everything you need to give shape up a shot on your team or at your company to see if it fixes the problems that you're having shipping great products a big thank you to Des trainer Bob mea and Chris spec for suggesting questions and topics for this conversation if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube also if you become a paid subscriber of my newsletter you get an
• 02:00 - 02:30 entire year free of perplexity Pro notion superhuman linear and granola check it out at Lenny newsletter. medom with that I bring you Ryan Singer this episode is brought to you by work OS if you're building a SAS app at some point your customers will start asking for Enterprise features like samel authentication and skim provisioning that's where work OS comes in making it fast and painless to add Enterprise features to your app their
• 02:30 - 03:00 apis are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features today hundreds of companies are already powered by work OS including ones you probably know like versel webflow and Loom workos also recently acquired warrant the fine grain authorization service warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube this
• 03:00 - 03:30 enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases if you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other Enterprise features like single sign on skim or user management you should consider work OS it's a drop-in replacement for op zero and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free check it out at work os.com to learn more that's workos
• 03:30 - 04:00 [Music] this episode is brought to you by merge product leaders yes like you cringe when they hear the word integration they're not fun for you to scope build launch or maintain and Integrations probably aren't what led you to product work in the first place lucky for you the folks at merge are obsessed with Integrations their single API helps SAS companies launch over 200 product Integrations in weeks not quarters think of merge like ad but for everything B2B sass
• 04:00 - 04:30 organizations like ramp data and electric use merge to access their customers accounting data to reconcile bill payments file storage data to create searchable databases in their product or hris data to autoprovision and deprovision access for their customers employees and yes if you need AI ready data for your SAS product then merge is the fastest way to get it so want to solve your organization's integration dilemma once and for all book and attend a me meeting at merge.
• 04:30 - 05:00 d/ Lenny and receive a $50 Amazon gift card that's merge. dv/ Lenny Ryan thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast he I'm really happy to be here thanks a lot I think this is going to be a legendary episode there's a lot of interest these days in different ways of working uh especially ways that aren't agile and safe and scrum and all these ways that people kind of hear about working
• 05:00 - 05:30 especially in this world of AI where everything's just changing feels like there's just an increased interest in exploring different ways of working and specifically feels like there's been a rise in interest in shape up the stuff that you talk about so I am really excited to basically help people understand what is this way of working uh is it right for them what are ways to start implementing it what are maybe some pitfalls you may run into and as much as possible get into a lot of real talk about how things are actually going on product teams that people and don't
• 05:30 - 06:00 like to hear so first of all just do you have you also seen this increased interest in shape up yeah you know I think it's interesting that we're talking now you know I mean the book came out in 2019 and uh it's just I've been hearing more and more like oh we we know somebody who's trying it or we're hearing it when we go talk to other companies you know like so I think it's a wave that's slowly building and it's funny you know like
• 06:00 - 06:30 when it came out I even tried to have like an online Forum to get everyone who's interested to talk together and what I started to learn pretty early on is that people don't like to talk about their struggles shipping especially you know cpos and uh CTO don't like to go in a public forum and say our company isn't shipping or our engineering team is stuck or our team is always lost in the weeds you know that's not a uh it's not an easy uh Community uh topic on on an online Forum you know so I think there's also some reasons why it's been Word of
• 06:30 - 07:00 Mouth kind of slowly Gathering steam that's something I struggle with on this podcast you know it's as you said it's a product and prodct teams don't want to be sharing that things aren't going great that's why I introduced failure corner on the podcast where it's like okay but tell me at time things didn't go well oh yeah that's great yeah cuz it's so hard to get to that right and it's not all just this golden path Rosie where we're all you know shipping beautiful meaningful things all day you know it's a it's a hard business and there's no like perfect School either
• 07:00 - 07:30 that kind of produces expert product managers and and cpos and CTO and stuff like that so we're all like trying to figure this out and we don't have a lot of sources you know so it's there is a lot of struggle and there aren't like many options for how to build product like all people really read about is Scrum agile safe as they scale and then there's like waterfall which I never do waterfall and then there's uh like the startup way just like ship and maybe one or two week cycles and then their shape up so it feels like like it's one of the
• 07:30 - 08:00 rare other options that exists and so that's one of the things I've been hearing it's like I hear like oh we thought there was only scrum or combon and then we heard there was this shape up thing like what's that and I I think it's always been connected to base camp we're going to talk about that just like it's like it works for companies that are nothing like base count maybe maybe just T touch on that briefly well I mean that came as a surprise to me you know uh I mean when I wrote the book I had
• 08:00 - 08:30 been in base camp at that time I think 15 years and uh uh I actually didn't even know the outside world you know I mean it was Jason's idea to even write the book because he said look like a lot of people are going to want to know about this a lot of people are struggling and I'm kind of like well okay like I knew our inside story of we had some growing pains and we had to be able to formalize the way that we were working in shipping so that as we brought new people in that they could participate in that and we could stay fast you know so I knew our like struggles and I honestly didn't know
• 08:30 - 09:00 anything about the outside world and it was only after the book came out that it gave me this kind of excuse to start talking to people from all kinds of different companies and it's been really interesting there are some really amazing cases of companies of very different characteristics from base camp like VC funded you know significantly bigger like very different pressures different team structure different skills who are doing it and at the same time there's also a lot of questions
• 09:00 - 09:30 that are coming in my way because honestly there are so few teams that are structured just like base camp that there are a lot of gaps in the book of like well what about this and what about that and how do we do that in our situation so like a lot of my focus today is actually kind of closing those gaps and helping people figure out how can I make this work for me or for our team and you specifically told me you now call it instead of shape up it's shape up in real life or shape up for real life yeah well you know my wife heard me saying the same thing over and over again on every phone call and she's
• 09:30 - 10:00 she's overhearing me and she's like you got you have to make a course you have to do something because you're just you always are saying the same thing so then this this led to this uh course that we made which is called shaping in real life and well yeah the idea is the real life part right how do I make this work if my designers don't code if you know if I have actually uh it's very contentious to get engineering time you know what I mean like when there's all these different pressures That Base Camp didn't have we're going to get into the Ned gritty of how this actually works in the key elements but can you just give
• 10:00 - 10:30 like a very short over overarching summary of how Shape Up is different from how other product approaches are I think the way it's different starts with kind of how the way we were working was a little bit different um so I started working with Jason and David on the first version of base camp you know that which was like the flagship product of 37 signals back in 2003 and we were a team of three and uh we were I mean I think it's for any really small team
• 10:30 - 11:00 when you're just starting out you don't need a process you don't need a way of working it just kind of happens organically because you're together you don't have to explain it to other people you know it just kind of happens on its own right but there was always this really intense urgency from both Jason and David like we've got to get to something we can ship we have to finish this and move on we have to get to something that's done there was just no tolerance for kind of big things that got fuzzy and started to drag there was always this like sharpening to get to
• 11:00 - 11:30 what is this thing really and when are we going to get to the end soon and on top of that even when we were building V1 David wasn't actually full-time as the as our only technical person he was programming 10 hours a week so we had this really intense pressure of like how can we really use David's time well you know we don't want to ever kind of give something that this is the thing we want to build and then it turns out not to be what we want we have to throw it away and then come back again or you know what I mean like those kind of uh bad
• 11:30 - 12:00 cycles of waste let me actually ask about this because this is really interesting so this is dhh uh he was working part-time when when he started 37 10 hours a week yeah was he working on like Ruby basically and that whole thing uh well rails came out of of of the first so so he told he told Jason I want to try building this in Ruby and uh because before they had done some collaboration and David had done things in PHP before that and he
• 12:00 - 12:30 had this new idea he wanted to try Ruby this language he fell in love with and then you know the framework Ruby on Rails he he ended up releasing that after base camp was standing because it was kind of extracted from uh the things that were necessary to get V1 of base camp to stand up so that's what he was doing the rest of his time instead of I don't know I don't know what he was doing the rest of his time you know probably something great but he's always he's always been like that you know he's always doing something interesting like he's either racing or who knows what you know what I mean like so but all I knew
• 12:30 - 13:00 was that we got 10 hours of of that time I love that that was like a constraint to design a way of working that uses engineering time most efficiently yeah I mean put that put that together so David's constraint of 10 hours a week and then Jason has this I mean I think many really successful Founders and especially CEOs have this thing it's like all they want to see is movement you know what I mean like forward forward forward so like when do we get to see it when do we get to try it when do I get to put it into somebody's hands so that combination there was just so
• 13:00 - 13:30 much urgency even though there was no outside pressure you know what I mean it was completely just like let's say cultural energy of like how do we kind of keep getting somewhere and getting to something that we can celebrate and get excited about I love that that's and that's like an attribute I think of a lot of successful Founders so that makes sense to hear that totally totally and that's where where I come back to like this is the part of the story where I think so many companies would say yeah I know that experience right because I think
• 13:30 - 14:00 that's probably the seedling of a lot as you said of successful companies is that that combination of urgency and also that those guys were so talented and that they they had a Clear Vision of what they wanted to do and all of that is this amazing time actually these early days is there anything more to the backstory that's important to share super interesting yeah I mean the other big piece of it was so Jason and I were like this kind of product what do you call it like the 2/3 you know and then there so I was doing ux at the time
• 14:00 - 14:30 and I was doing Hands-On coding as well so we're very very integrated everybody kind of does a little bit of everything all of us were coding like Jason was in the actual app templates as well doing HTML and CSS to do the views he's doing Hands-On design we're all like very much connected with like why are we building this what is this you know David's doing the David's doing the bulk of the programming and Jason and I were having these little sessions these little sessions where we would really figure
• 14:30 - 15:00 out what the idea was and there would be this moment where you would have a few Strokes of the Sharpie pen on a big pad of paper and all of a sudden you'd be like oh yeah like that's the idea that's the thing we want to go try to build and for me like those those sessions with Jason they were these short very very intense sessions where you're trying to crack the nut together like where's the idea what's the concept like how can we
• 15:00 - 15:30 go what's this thing that we're going to go and like 10 hours later right David's going to come back and we're going to be like this is awesome this thing works and it does something we're excited about right that was really kind of the seedling I mean actually that continued over years and years and years those sessions and that's the seedling of of this word in the book shaping what does it mean to do shaping it wasn't uh sitting alone um writing a document it wasn't making a bunch of requirements it
• 15:30 - 16:00 wasn't making a beautiful figma file to represent a concept that could maybe be a feature you know it was this like super intense really exciting collaborative like what about this what about that oh maybe this you know uh so that was a a really big part of of how we worked also very intensely collaborative sessions to figure out what the idea is and getting it sharp enough and and crispy enough that we could very confidently get a yes from
• 16:00 - 16:30 David and that he would know exactly what it is and what it means and come back and it would be what we pictured and it would work the way that we hoped so that we would kind of keep going and we wouldn't have to reverse or or go back to the drawing board what it sounds like is essentially are kind of trying to maintain the startup way of working as the company grows like everything you're describing is how it feels to be at a startup and this is a method to keep that does that sound right that's EX exactly what what kind of became
• 16:30 - 17:00 Shape Up was how do we hold on to that as much as possible I mean one big ingredient we had an advantage also which was that Jason and David hired so deliberately slowly and this is kind of um like a fortunate side effect of the fact that they didn't take investment money so there was kind of there wasn't there was never that moment of like now's the moment when we grow it was always like one person and then kind of the organ adapts one more person you know and so
• 17:00 - 17:30 this this natural way of working it was it was organically spreading they there were I think maybe 10 years before we had the first kind of like wait a minute what just happened like that's not like that project didn't go well that's not how things normally run you know I mean we really it was it was I mean of course there were always like ups and downs but there was it was it was about 10 years later when we had
• 17:30 - 18:00 the first project I I mean I remember the project I remember being at the end of it it was at that time already kind of it was maybe it had been like maybe six weeks or seven weeks we hadn't yet completely locked the six week thing that went into shape of and I remember we had a review session and there was a fairly new uh new person who was leading the the uh who's doing half of the work on that team we had the review session and it was like instead of oh look this is
• 18:00 - 18:30 about ready to ship it was like there are a lot of open questions here and not only are there a lot of open questions here we're not getting quick answers when we have you know as we as we're asking and what we're starting to realize is like oh this is not only is this not going to ship but we can't even see the end of this you know and uh and that was like one of those moments where you're like oh this isn't going to
• 18:30 - 19:00 automatically organically just keep spreading as we hire forever you know what I mean we did reach a point where it's like oh this we're going to have to figure out when this goes well why does it go well and what do we do differently and how do we kind of formalize that so it's it's reproducible as we keep on boarding more people and that's that's actually when shape up as a as a framework started that's when I really kind of started to lean in and I sort of took over that responsibility of okay
• 19:00 - 19:30 how do I systematize this that's a great segue to Let's actually talk about how the shape up method Works what are maybe just at a high level what are like the core ingredients to the shape up method there's basically um kind of like three maybe big things the so the first thing is this notion of we are not going to start something unless we can see the end from the beginning so we're not going to take take a big a big concept and
• 19:30 - 20:00 then say what's the estimate for this thing we're not going to say oh we need to be build a calendar and then do a whole bunch of figma files or write a whole bunch of requirements and then ask for an estimate we're going to go the other way around and we're going to say what is our appetite for this what is the maximum amount of time we're willing to go before we actually finish something and we have that startup moment that we talked about that moment of like ah you know what I mean it works we got somewhere we this at least this if not the whole product this meaningful piece we can literally
• 20:00 - 20:30 walk away from so um then what we found was that there was a lot of experimentation we found that six weeks is kind of the maximum that we could see into the future where we could actually say like how do we work backward and figure out something we could build in that six weeks and really land it you know so that's kind of the first piece is working backward from our the amount of time we actually want to spend on something and say what can we do what
• 20:30 - 21:00 could we shape so that after that amount of time we've gotten to somewhere we want to be you know it's kind of like if you're going to buy a car or you're going to you're going to you're going to buy a house or you're going to rent a new flat or whatever you have to have like a budget in mind right and the the the budget then is how you choose between all kinds of Alternatives and make a lot of hard choices and tradeoffs to figure out like well you know I I I I want the faster engine you know but but I can't AF you know but I have to give
• 21:00 - 21:30 this up or you know I I wanted it to be fun to drive but we also need space for longer road trips and you know you're making all these tradeoffs right so this is kind of this uh this second piece is is this work that we call shaping and the shaping work is how do we actually take this fixed amount of time that we've given ourselves and Vary the scope how do we come up with a idea some version of this that's going to work in the amount of
• 21:30 - 22:00 time that the business is interested in spending so um this is that those creative sessions that I was talking about where we're jumping all over the all over the room in front of the Whiteboard and uh and and getting to an idea and there the really key thing is that we're getting to an idea where we can see the idea you know we understand like why we're doing this we're wrestling with the problem and we're wrestling with the solution until we have an idea that we can actually say uh this is what we want to go build so it's
• 22:00 - 22:30 not just calendar or dashboard or you know newsletter Builder but it's like this idea of how we're going to tackle this problem about the calendar request right so that's the shaping and then the third piece is when we've actually carved out a fixed amount of time when we've shaped a solution that is from a experience standpoint from a
• 22:30 - 23:00 functionality standpoint from a technical standpoint doable and desirable something that we can make happen in that amount of time then we can give it to a team and we don't have to do the sometimes call Scrum the the paper shredder you know that's where you take an idea and then you split it into a 100 tickets right and you hope that it all glues together still after you've done that step you know we don't want to do that instead we want to have a whole idea give it to a team so they see the
• 23:00 - 23:30 whole they really understand it right and then they can come up with their tasks and they can figure out how to track that and break it into pieces so they can actually take more responsibility and so what we see is way more engagement you know especially from the technical team right because instead of like here's your ticket right or here's your user story it's like here's a thing you understand that makes sense and now you're going to have freedom to
• 23:30 - 24:00 figure out how to actually make this a reality there's going to be a million things to solve in the implementation detail and now you have a bunch of fun problems and you don't have to keep asking questions to other people to understand what this is or how do I make a trade-off or that kind of a thing one of the core elements of this that I want to confirm is that you can pick and choose these things into your team you don't need to do this wholesale correct uh you don't need to do uh yeah any of it so so this is where we kind of it helps to
• 24:00 - 24:30 it helps to look at like what's going wrong and what are we trying to fix yeah and then you know what do I want to bring into this right and usually what I notice is that people they like to start sometimes with oh I want to give the team let's say six weeks and I and I want to give the team more latitude or let's say more creative freedom that they are going to be responsible in this six weeks to figure out how to make it happen right and usually a lot of the drive for that is I'm getting tired of having so many meetings and rituals and
• 24:30 - 25:00 things that are not actually working on the problem and doing the work you know I mean especially scrum teams they they often complain about that so what they sometimes see in this is like oh I love this idea that the team is just going to be cooking for six weeks and they're not going to you know we're going to meet as needed and we're going to Workshop things but we're not going to be busy with all these rituals all the time right uh now the thing that's tricky is that if you want that reality of the team happily buzzing and humming
• 25:00 - 25:30 like a you know like some happy bee Colony you know for this six weeks they need to have a lot more clarity around what's the thing that we're solving right and so when we start working backward from that then what we see is that oh well if we don't shape better then the team isn't going to have the clarity that they need to take over that responsibility you know so they can make choices and make decisions and make tradeoffs so that they can get to the end of this thing and worse the worse is
• 25:30 - 26:00 that sometimes see cases where people are like okay we're doing shape up so you guys are going to build you know the newsletter Builder okay but you only get six weeks to do it so use your fixed time vary your scope and and and and enjoy your responsibility you know what I mean which is just cruel right because I think I quote uh Bob mea who's been on your show a couple times you can't put 10 pounds of crap in a five pound bag so
• 26:00 - 26:30 uh High academic statement you know and uh we can't just take any project no matter how giant it is and then throw it at a team and say figure it out and and ship ship something meaningful in six weeks by cutting away scope right so what start it starts it starts to it starts to raise questions about how do we actually decide together what this project is do we actually have Clarity around what the idea is on what we're going to build you know let me follow up
• 26:30 - 27:00 in a couple of the elements so appetites I think for any product manager engineer designer anyone that is like experienced okay we're gonna We estimate this all this landing page is going to take a couple weeks great let's work on it and then ends up being six weeks uh can understand why this makes sense it's just like this landing page is not that important to us let us just say we will commit two weeks to it we'll do as much as we can in two weeks and then we move on and scope is not allowed to go beyond that makes total sense like this just makes so much sense as you listen to
• 27:00 - 27:30 this uh especially for people that have just fallen into the the problems of estimates not being accurate then there's a six we element and the key there is you're you're and this is uh kind of counter to maybe two week Sprints like scrum is that kind of the where this com from so you know actually it turns out that the sixth week is only a maximum and that's really where this number does some work for us if we think of six weeks as a maximum that's going
• 27:30 - 28:00 to force us to ask some really good questions to ourselves about where do we act what what piece of this do we really think we can land because if you try to say you know in six months we're going to ship this thing you can't get your arms around all of the problems that have to get solved for an entire six-month chunk of work to actually happen there are so many unknowns there are so many ticking time bombs of things that we didn't understand or wouldn't foresee you know but if we if we set a
• 28:00 - 28:30 ceiling at 6 weeks we have a much better chance of I think that's a size of something where we can actually shape it and surface enough unknowns and reveal that complexity before we're in the middle of it right it doesn't mean that we can't use this technique to do a two-e project you know especially if you're on a growth team you don't want to wait six weeks or you know what I mean you're going to have to artificially bundle things together to do six weeks it's like look I've got I've got something I want to I want to ship in the next week and then I've got
• 28:30 - 29:00 a thing that might take two weeks after that and then a week after that right so uh it's it's it's more question of what we're trying to take on you know it's really that upper limit okay so it could be a two we cycle and the could be two week thing cool so it's like we're gonna build this new landing page we're gonna give it two weeks and then do a shaping session on that now the the other thing the other side of that is when it comes to feature development or you know building something that's going to be needy enough to sell you know then there's very few things that are
• 29:00 - 29:30 going to be a substantial value add to a product that you can do in two weeks right so then you get into a point where well now we're just kind of sprinting and we're just kind of taking one bite after the other and then that's where we can land in that situation where we feel like ah I can never see the end of this I just keep going back and saying one more Sprint one more Sprint one more Sprint right but six weeks is a long enough chunk or sometimes four weeks the question is kind of what's big enough that we can actually get somewhere with
• 29:30 - 30:00 this amount of time right and there's an implied element to this that I think is worth highlighting the whole idea is you commit to the appetite and if you are not on track to hit that instead of extending the date you cut in order to still hit it this is a tricky one so you're right that it's implied but the thing is in real life if you make a commitment and you get alignment
• 30:00 - 30:30 that we're going to spend six weeks of engineering time building this thing you know if you get to that end of that six weeks and something is going wrong you know it wasn't shaped we can't see the end of it it's more complicated than we thought all these different things and by the way we can also talk about kind of why those things happen you know but when we get in that situation if we're at the end of the 6 weeks and it's not looking good I mean we can't just cut off off what we agreed to that made this
• 30:30 - 31:00 thing valuable you know we can't just like cut the scope and say oh well now we manage to ship inside of six weeks that's going to kill everybody's morale everyone's going to feel disappointed we're going to feel like this wasn't really worthwhile and now we go into the next cycle with this kind of like Debt Feeling you know that we didn't actually finish the thing we were kind of supposed to finish so now we're like overtime you know none of that is good and if we also go the other extreme and just say um well like it we actually we
• 31:00 - 31:30 say in the book you know we had this principle at at base camp which was this notion of the circuit breaker like if a project is not on track to actually finish after the six weeks we're just going to cancel it and rethink you know almost no teams have the stomach for that but the the version of that that's more stomachal is look we can't just uh we can't just cancel the project and then say let's see what comes next right but what we can do is say we're not going to keep reinvesting in something that we
• 31:30 - 32:00 don't understand you know so let's take this out of build mode and bring this back into shaping mode which might mean different people a different conversation asking different questions you know doing a different kind of work to sus out like what is it that's fuzzy here what is it that we couldn't see like what do we not understand that's right how do we get to the clar that we need so that we can actually say like
• 32:00 - 32:30 this thing is going to happen if we give it another whack I love just how real this approach is not this like theoretical okay cool after six weeks you just the scope and it's all that's cool yeah you just cut the scope you know no problem what you got sh what you got I've seen some Shape Up adoptions that looked like that by the way and that's it's uh you know it's it's that's that's not the way uh we the the shaping step is crucial and you what what you mentioned with your landing page example by the way it's so seductive because we can imagine you know oh you
• 32:30 - 33:00 know Parkinson's law right if you give me six weeks to do the landing page I'll find a way to use it but if you give me two weeks you know then I'll stop after two weeks but when it comes to real product work you know where there's some functionality that we have to figure out how to make it exist we can't just cut the scope if we run out of time so what it means is that the shaping work is really working hard together to
• 33:00 - 33:30 figure out what are the main moving pieces of this thing right how do we narrow down our understanding of the problem and how do we identify what the moving parts are of the solution and like what actually connects together for this feature to work you know and when we really get to the level where we can say oh we need to do this this this this and then the engine is going to turn you know that's that's the place where we can say ah this is well shaped you know
• 33:30 - 34:00 and and that's a that's a it's a different kind of work we in in shaping in real life we call it you know we actually teach it is doing live shaping sessions and uh this was how I did it for years with Jason we'd get into the room you know and I had both the technical and the ux side so the both sides were kind of represented there in one person in that case but for a lot of teams today we actually teach them how to bring uh the kind of the the the senior engineer ing person who isn't just senior en title but you know like
• 34:00 - 34:30 the one who actually knows where the bodies are buried you know like how the old stuff works and what's truly possible and what's hard and what's easy in our infrastructure like the person that really knows right you bring that person together with the product person who deeply understands the backstory of why this is an opportunity and what we're trying to solve with this you know and then a designer in the room and they're like whiteboarding and wrestling with each other to get to what's a version of this thing that we believe that's real that we can actually finish in that time this is great let's let's
• 34:30 - 35:00 go one level deeper on this shaping session so a few tactical questions how long are these sessions it sounds like the people that join are the a designer and an engineer in an mpm so add anything else there and when do they happen is at the end of a do you call a cycle by the way or Sprint this the sixish with period what I actually like is time box actually because the thing is that um some teams need regular Cycles because
• 35:00 - 35:30 they have parallel teams and they need that Cadence in order to kind of reduce management overhead you know but if you're small and you only have like one or two teams you might not need to be on a fixed Cadence or a cycle plan you might be able to just set one time box after another right so the key thing is actually that that time is pushing back at you and that you're being intentional about kind of what's my time budget that I need to shape into let me take a quick tangent because if you're that's so interesting that the time boxes can be very different links imagine at a larger
• 35:30 - 36:00 company this gets complicated when other teams are trying there's dependencies and timelines launch and go to market dates and all these things what's like the largest company this this approach has worked at like like what's the ideal company stage for Shape Up it can function in very large companies uh we have for example uh I have H some friends at a uh at a uh they're a uh uh what is what is it called they're doing a clinical trials so they're in the pharmaceutical industry and I mean the
• 36:00 - 36:30 companies you know thousands of people and it's not that every team is doing this but they have a few teams that are working in important areas you know and they're doing this and uh it's completely possible in that context if you have someone who's at a senior level on on the engineering side who is able to uh make the right architectural choices and also do some some some negotiating and kind of be the back stop
• 36:30 - 37:00 to make sure that someone isn't going to get pulled away onto something else you know you can kind of carve out oh this system can be worked on independently of that system this was actually what David at at base camp has always been amazing at is this dependency hell it's actually not it's not a so many people are used to it and they think that it's just how it is but it's actually not it is possible for engineering lead leadership good engineering leadership untangles
• 37:00 - 37:30 things so we can work on this system without having to be thinking about this other system somewhere else you know so when you have some untangling with your infrastructure and with your architecture from an engineering standpoint then you have some freedom and then if you can also figure out the capacity management side of I'm going to protect this team from that other work for this number of weeks you know you can really get a lot done this Insight that you can operate this way at a larger company and the whole company doesn't have to operate this way I think is really freeing to a lot of people
• 37:30 - 38:00 what's kind of like the adapter and I want to come back to the actual shaping process but I I can't help but ask this say the company's operating like a quarterly Cadence or six-month Cadence and then there's like a team operating in a two week sometimes six weeks sometime four we Cadence advice on how to like what's the adapter that connects those two cadences so uh there's there's kind of two different things so like I've seen cases where they've decided on a uh like a a 4 week plus two week or like so so they'll do like a like five
• 38:00 - 38:30 week and then one week of cool down in between and then they they they time it so that it adds up to a quarter you know I've seen that um the other thing I've seen is when the team is just continuously delivering meaningful things it doesn't have to line up because from the executive level if you are CPO or CTO or I mean in these bigger cases it's more like you know VP in some area but you're coming to the table where you're supposed to be reporting of what your group is doing
• 38:30 - 39:00 and when you are consistently saying we said we were going to do this and nothing finished and now we're doing this and it's going to finish and the next time you say we said we were going to do that and it's finished you know without excuses and without well maybe another few more months or you know we're working at it like that I mean that's that's what that's what everyone wants to see is that movement you know yeah if you're doing great people leave you alone that makes sense for sure I love that I love that point okay coming back to shaping one one maybe one way
• 39:00 - 39:30 that would make it really easy for people to understand what's the output of the shaping session the output of the shaping session is so and by the way about shaping session you know let's maybe we can talk a little bit about what shaping is not you know because um we need the contrast sometimes so very often when people try shape up what I see is a product team kind of creating either a lot of figma files or maybe uh a lot of documentation you
• 39:30 - 40:00 know like U like a PRD with a bunch of requirements and a bunch of backstory and good reasons why we're doing this and stuff like that and what you see is that um when you when you give that to a team as like this is what we shaped what happens is like it it blows up so I mean you probably uh know about what happens when the the the figma file makes first contact with the engineering team there's a reality check that happens
• 40:00 - 40:30 there you know and very often there's a kind of a back to the drawing board so when there's a lot of solutioning all the way down to detail without engineering involved usually that's a painful recipe you know and then it's kind of like no we can't do that actually it doesn't work like that and then on top of it the other big challenge is that there's so much that you can't see on the surface of a UI you know how do we flow from here to there what are the different cases of of logic
• 40:30 - 41:00 like in which case do we move from here to here to here in the flow like what is happening behind the scenes it's like the engineering team they have to put on their x-ray goggles and like study this thing to try and understand like what's happening underneath you know I often use this analogy of like uh if you're doing a home renovation you know you can have like the most like uh beautiful rendering of here's the new here's the new bedroom and we're going to have these lamps on the side of the bed you know that are coming out from the wall these like you know and you can like
• 41:00 - 41:30 have the perfect rendering and the perfect lamp and the perfect color but if you haven't checked if there's electricity in that wall there or not right it's going to drastically change the cost and the time and everything if you're going to have to rip open those walls to feed some lines up to those lamps right so what we need to do in a in a shaping session when it's going well is we come out with some kind of uh uh of drawing or diagram where and Engineers product and design are all
• 41:30 - 42:00 looking at that and they're saying we understand that I know exactly what to go build right I'll use the example of the calendar from the book so what is a calendar you know so first of all there was this work that we had to do before we could even shape it which is like can we actually narrow down this problem in shaping in real life we call this Framing and uh in the book there's a chapter called setting the boundaries where we get into this and it's like look we we we're not going to just build
• 42:00 - 42:30 calendar which is like Google Calendar you know where we who knows where it ends we narrowed it down to we understand that for our specific customers who are requesting this again and again it's more about I need to see empty spaces and in the existing agenda view I can only see things that are already scheduled and I can't see free spaces where I could book something okay so we got to that point of like so the what we're trying to solve here is the empty spaces so that's a good frame then
• 42:30 - 43:00 what are we actually going to build we came to here's a good rule of thumb if it's shaped well you can usually describe it in less than 10 moving pieces okay if I can say it's going to have this this this this this and this and that's how we're going to let people see the empty spaces you know that's a good indicator that it's clear enough that that that it's that it's shaped well so in this case we had a you know when you go to an airline and you and you want to book something you see this
• 43:00 - 43:30 like two-month grid right so it's like there's going to be two month side by side but um they're just going to have dots in them to indicate if there's if there's a free day or not or I mean if there's something in that day or not kind of like you know the iPhone calendar I think still has this where it's just dots on the month view and then if you tap a day with a dot in it or without a dot in it there's going to be an agenda view that slides underneath which is going to show you what's scheduled in that day right and then there's going to be navigation to go forward and back in the months there's
• 43:30 - 44:00 going to be a create button to create an event right and that's more or less that's more or less it so what you can see here is it's not a like what is a calendar you know it's not a calendar it's a it's a it's a twomon DOT grid with scrolling and gender view underneath right and uh and the ability to to hit new when you're looking at an empty space to create something in what you're viewing right so that's the kind of thing where
• 44:00 - 44:30 that's shaped and we can talk about what that means and what it entails and we can have a really practical realistic conversation about is that a thing we can do in six weeks you know that's that's going to be a real conversation and not looking at a whole bunch of mockups and and trying to x-ray to figure out what's actually the intent here and what's really real and what's not and what's possible and what's not that was a great example this is really helpful so if I were to try to describe this what you're coming out of it with a shaping session with is a kind of like
• 44:30 - 45:00 the user the the user experience with just like wireframes sketches of the screens and the key buttons and flows so it's kind of like the architecture with key components not like a dock of spec and not final design and also not just like a user story as a user I need to be able to see empty spaces exactly so so cuz that's the thing where it goes wrong you know if if we're going to commit
• 45:00 - 45:30 engineering time you know and it's like we believe there's some way to see empty spaces but you know the way is a question mark it's a really risky way to spend that time because you're committing right it's like yeah we're committing and that time is really valuable right that's six weeks of engineer time you know and that time wasn't easy to get in the first place right because of course there's all these other forces in the company that want to be doing something with the engineers right you know so if we want that team to be really using that time
• 45:30 - 46:00 well where they are moving they understand what they're solving and they're creatively engaged because they know what it's supposed to be doing right you know they need to have that Clarity both on the problem side of this is about DM spaces and on the solution side of it's a DOT CD with two months and a scrolling agenda View and a button there's still a million interesting creative tasks there in the actual High Fidelity design in the code you know there's so many things to solve there
• 46:00 - 46:30 but that is something that they can all hold in their heads and understand and and work on this episode is brought to you by air table product Central the unified system that brings your entire product or together in one place no more scattered tools no more misalign teams if you're like most product leaders you're tired of Constant Contact switching between tools that's why air table built product Central after Decades of working with worldclass product companies think of it as mission control for your entire product
• 46:30 - 47:00 organization unlike rigid Point Solutions product Central Powers everything from resourcing to voice of customer to Road mapping to launch execution and because it's built on air table's no code platform you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team Works no limitations no compromises ready to see it in action head to airtable.com Lenny to book a demo that's airtable.com Lenny you mentioned and I think a lot of PMS listening to this are going to be like
• 47:00 - 47:30 uh I'm scared of doing this is if you get too detailed uh the engineers and designers on the team are just like what the hell you're just telling me what to build that sucks I don't want to I don't want that kind of work so what's like is is the solution to that the engineering lead was super involved in detailed and the design lead was super involved and so you can trust that it's that you're not just the Code Monkey building the thing they told you to build that's really interesting I got to tell you the dominant failure
• 47:30 - 48:00 case that I see in the real world is always again and again not enough detail and it's also the most common failure mode where Engineers run back to the to the product folks and say I'm not getting enough from you it's it's it's it's really like that but I can understand why the um the hair stands up on the back of the neck a little bit you know thinking about it because um of course if you if you give
• 48:00 - 48:30 a senior engineer like here's how I want you to go implement the schema for this database change for this model they're going to be like what do you like like who are you who are you you know what I mean but what what's really interesting is it's not a universal thing the amount of detail that the team is going to feel helps them is a dial that we can turn that depends on who on the team so if you have a more Junior person who's on the build team and then
• 48:30 - 49:00 you have a more senior engineer Who's involved in the shaping they can make that Junior engineer much more successful with additional detail right so like we're going to do this and I would suggest approaching it like this this this and this right that Junior person is when they don't know how to do it they're not going to ask because they don't want to show that they don't know and they're going to hide the fact that they're lost and it's going to blow up later in the project and and on the
• 49:00 - 49:30 other hand if they are given more guidance they're going to be able to be successful they're going to learn about you know this is how this person who knows well kind of approached it and then in the next round or a few you know a few projects later you can dial it back and say well let's let's give less de detail and see how they handle it right so you can really give people bigger shoes to grow into and and and help them to be successful and then of course you can also do it the other way around around where uh if if you've got some really Stellar Talent on the team
• 49:30 - 50:00 and you have a long history and you have a lot of trust that they are going to be able to understand and solve it then of course you can leave things out right but the the the thing that I often see is if there's someone on the bill team who really feels that they should be involved in the fundamental decisions about the approach then a better solution would be to actually bring them into the shaping and have them play that technical role in the shaping session
• 50:00 - 50:30 you know if they're re if they have the right skills and the right perspective and the right knowledge to play that role well then just bring them into the shaping right so it's all about how do we bring people into a moment where we are using their strengths you know and then we're giving them an input so that whatever their kind of workstep is that they are able to apply the maximum creativity but also have the maximum Clarity so that they can really use that time well and also like feel good about what they're doing feels like the core
• 50:30 - 51:00 of this is uh drisk the biggest risks and uh address the biggest unknowns as much as possible like there's probably this 80% of here are the risks let's just uh understand them deeply before we Comm into this appetite that is exactly right um there are these uh uh you know we can call them rabbit holes we can call them time bombs there are these things where we say oh you know it'll be fine you know like one example like simple example I worked with a team and they they had a step of onboarding in a fintech product okay and there was this
• 51:00 - 51:30 step of onboarding and they would lose a lot of people in the funnel at that step because you had to fill out a whole bunch of information and they they figured out that they could actually pipe that data in from one of the partners that they had because they were partnered with banks and they're like oh we don't even need to be asking people this right so we're GNA we're going to fix conversion we're going to eliminate a step from our user experience it's going to be great right you know the thing that they didn't look at was if you go into the code on that step of the
• 51:30 - 52:00 onboarding it's not actually one step there's like three different branches of that step depending on which bank the customer is is integrated on you know and so that's the kind of thing where it all sounds so great and simple and then you get into the weeds and you realize like oh wait a minute you know what I mean so now we have decisions to make now if you're in the middle of a project and it's already been resourced right and people are already on the hook that we're supposed to be doing this and you already got the alignment that the
• 52:00 - 52:30 engineering time is happening for this and you're finding that out in week four you know what I mean uh you did all these beautiful drawings by the way and now you're finding this out in week four like that's a bad place to be but if we're in the shaping room and we didn't kick this thing off yet right we didn't even Greenlight the project yet and we have an engineer there not just the product people not just the designer but we have that engineer who really insists on sometimes I like to think of it you
• 52:30 - 53:00 know like the grumpy old plumber who's seen everything and he insists on opening up the walls and looking at the pipes before he'll give you a quote right so it's like when you've got that person in the room they're saying yeah that all sounds great let's take a quick look at the code and figure out what screen you're actually talking about just let's just take a quick look and it only takes a moment to open up the code find this thing that we're talking about and really look at it and say oh you know it's more complicated than we thought and now it's not like okay now we're
• 53:00 - 53:30 screwed and the project is going to be bigger no now we can have a really cool conversation about tradeoffs so let's say we've got three different Integrations here three different segments integrated into different banks how big are they relative to each other right in terms of the deals we made or the percentage of customers who flow through those three different conditions right if we just did this on one of those branches would it be a win you know and like if we did it in all three how much more time would we have
• 53:30 - 54:00 to negotiate for and would it feel worth it you see like we're getting into this horse trading of like what is important what's worth it what do we need to get out of it and that's really productive that's and when you're doing that before the project starts off that feels like oh we're talking about the important things we're not failing right now we're engaged in the hard questions that are going to enable us to really ship something that's successful later let's go one level deeper uh on this shaping session because clearly that is so core to this working and I know you have a
• 54:00 - 54:30 whole book about like how to actually do this so we're not going to answer all the questions and there's a lot of detail on new ones but a few questions how long do these usually take is like sounds like a whole day kind of experience and then sounds like you invite as few people as possible but not too few people what's your guidance on who should join so we um we run uh in this shaping and real life course we've been doing workshops where we try to help people to learn what it's like in a shaping session and one of the things that's always interesting to me is how
• 54:30 - 55:00 so like kti and I will be running the session and we have to like people aren't used to working so fast you know to like like what are we actually doing right now what's the decision like what's an idea like right now we're we're not going to go away and and and and draw something and then and then all comment on a document and then come back and get together tomorrow like what ideas do we actually have right now like starting from zero so like
• 55:00 - 55:30 imagine like imagine like uh we we we've narrowed down the calendar problem to it's about empty spaces right we are willing from a business standpoint to spend six weeks on a whack at this where it's solved we believe there's a way that's possible so what can we come up with and that's how you that's the input to the framing session or sorry the the shaping session exactly so that's so the the having a
• 55:30 - 56:00 narrowed down problem from the framing work and this is a whole other topic of you know very often the PMS are sometimes just taking something at face value and not negotiating down to really narrow down what is this really you know and where is the value in this but let's suppose that that's happened right that we've narrowed down the problem so now we've got a narrow problem so now what we need to do is try out different ideas and and this is the real thing we have to try to break
• 56:00 - 56:30 them so I want to draw an idea and then I want the technical person to find like oh this isn't going to you know what I mean this isn't going to work because of this reason or the product person is going to be looking in and saying I don't think like I get that that's really an easy way to do it technically but I don't think that we're actually delivering the value if I play through the customer scenario here you know what I mean so there's these different angles where the idea can fail and uh one of the things that we
• 56:30 - 57:00 also coach people to do in a session is not just to go down One path and then be sort of stuck in one idea and now you're kind of going in circles around little details of one idea for three hours but to really step back and say Here's an approach you know what if we had the scrolling agenda view okay and that's idea a like then what's what's a very different way of doing this you know what I mean like if we didn't want to have the agenda view there like is there a way to do this where it's just a month
• 57:00 - 57:30 view let's like see if we can draw that you know so that's that's the kind of thing that's happening you asked about the time and I started with like people aren't used to just going all the way into actually trying ideas you know so there is a a little bit of a learning how to just face that blank page and start trying things together you know what we find is that a three-hour session can be very very productive to
• 57:30 - 58:00 help you figure out kind of what what do we already have that are possible approaches to this what are some major missing things you know like okay I've got the C I've got the calendar do dot grid I've got the agenda idea but like what about what about multi-day events do you know what I mean like so there can be these things these like whatabouts so then maybe we break and we think for a little bit and somebody sketches some ideas on that and does a
• 58:00 - 58:30 spike or two on something and we come back again you know for another three hours we come back the next day right and what I would say is if if the project that you're trying to do is doable with let's say your existing technology right you're not inventing a new algorithm you're not inventing some new database or you know what I mean you're not doing um a new new AI model it's more about like how do I use the
• 58:30 - 59:00 apis and the Frameworks and the tech stack that we have how do I put that together to build something you know then you know if if if the if the problem is clear and The Time Is Now like you will be able to come to a conclusion about what's possible to build in you know three sessions something like that you know the key thing is leaning into those sessions and really wrestling with each other you know uh you have just the product and the designer there uh and and and then
• 59:00 - 59:30 it's kind of like well we'll show this to the technical person later then it's it can all blow up and then you find out it's more complicated than you thought you have to go back to the drawing board we need to have the right all the right the necessary information in the same room for these sessions to go fast there's so much genius built into this approach and it like sits on top of human nature uh one is just you you need to actually spend like go into the deep edge cases and nuances and not like let me yeah
• 59:30 - 60:00 that's fine let's gool more concreteness very concrete very like in in depth and then the appetites there's just like so many elements of this that just connect with the way humans work versus a theory of just like yeah well how long this will take it'll be go great and we'll figure it out as we're building we don't need to really figure this out yeah we don't have time for that and we're solving a puzzle together you know if it needs to be doable in this this amount of time but it also has to hit these points in terms of the problem we're
• 60:00 - 60:30 solving you know what I mean it kind of has to do these things but in this time and you know one other thing that I would mention is that um we can't be drawing figma files it by the way I'm I'm I'm I'm being very mean to to to figma you know so far in this conversation there is a time right when when it's the right time for the figma file right what we want to do is have that CL it around you know the let's say we already know where the sink
• 60:30 - 61:00 is going in the kitchen and now we can make final calls about the tile and and the the the the exact fixture and stuff like that right grout color we don't want to have to throw it all away every time something changes you know so there's a time and a place where figma is amazing and feels good and it's like oh now it's beautiful you know now it's amazing right but in a shaping session you can't collaborate on on on something so high fidelity right and so we need
• 61:00 - 61:30 also some ways to collaborate and this is where you see these techniques in the book like breadboarding and fat marker sketching these are tools to help us express an idea very very clearly in detail you know we're going to hit this button and from this button go to here this calculation runs then we get this answer and then we have this choice to go here or here right like that's the kind of thing that we need to be seeing and that's that's kind of the sort of the level of detail where we can move fast together but still see something
• 61:30 - 62:00 real is more this kind of breadboarding level fat marker session is like very vocative of what this whole session is about is like very high level sketches uh that's a great term the danger there that I often see is that um what we don't want is to say oh figma isn't the right thing at this level so instead we're going to do fat marker sketches and what you get is the equivalent of a blurry figma you know what I mean just less detail what we need from a from a fat marker sketch for it to be valuable to
• 62:00 - 62:30 us as as Builders is it has to really communicate the idea you so when I look at that I'm like oh now I get it right and if it's kind of more this sort of general wireframe of like you know dashboard goes here and there's going to be four reports and it's like I still don't know what to build right so if it's not telling me what to build so maybe this is a way to come back to question about what's the output of the shaping session it's
• 62:30 - 63:00 like it's shaped if we can give this to technical person and they say yeah I know what to go build now I'm very happy with our overview of the process I think we've done a really good job giving people the gist and obviously if they want to actually implement it they can get the book and dive in or work with you which will Point people to say someone's like this is awesome I want to do this what would you say is a good first step for a team that's currently let's say like they're in startup land and they're just like shipping every two weeks maybe every week so maybe for that
• 63:00 - 63:30 bucket of folks and then also for a larger company that's you know I don't know agile scrum safe and they're just like oh let's try something different sometimes uh Dev teams uh they like the idea of not having the scrum ritual so they want to take in the six weeks but uh unless the engineering and product come together to figure out how to collaboratively shape like we talked about before you know that time box isn't going to go well so they think they're going to not have to do standups
• 63:30 - 64:00 but now it's like a day of of hard thinking well it kind of turns into um even more meetings because we don't know what to do and the more meetings is just that shaping session specifically right no what I mean is that if we didn't if we didn't if we only adopted the if we only adopted the six week cycle and said uh we're going to figure it out and we didn't adopt the shaping then we just don't know what to do and then we the end and we're basically scrambling to shape it as we go and then we run out of time and then we feel like this wasn't
• 64:00 - 64:30 you know it was nice to get a break from the from the scrum rituals but we can't say that we are um you know what I mean uh knocking the champagne bottle on the boat because we're celebrating the launch you know or whatever you know again and again right this a good actually time to maybe talk about there's obviously the Sprint kickoff in scrum what's like the main difference for people because they may be thinking oh that's just like a Sprint kickoff that's oh that's a good one deal that's a good one so what you often see in uh in a scrum team is that there's somebody who creates these um tickets of like
• 64:30 - 65:00 these are the things that are going to happen inside of the Sprint you know and really in in in in my opinion too many cases it's not the person who's doing the building who's creating those tickets it's like a product owner so there's a big big gap there there's uh we could talk a lot about that um but there's there's gaps in context the person who's writing the ticket doesn't actually understand the work that's involved you know what I mean so there are so many unknowns and time bombs
• 65:00 - 65:30 waiting in those tickets that sound reasonable but they weren't really created by the person who understands the work that needs to happen you know so the key difference uh is two things so in scrum you have you have a person who's not the builders um making tickets and this is what in you know in the in the cruel picture is the paper shredder in in the Shape Up world you have a single
• 65:30 - 66:00 idea that was shaped this is the thing we shaped right with the two months and the agenda View and da da da go make your own tasks because you're the professionals you know what I mean so like the contractors you know like if you're building a house like they have to know the plans but you don't have to tell them now take the hammer and go over here you know uh that's their expertise right so in a shape of world that kickoff is uh Hugh's the well-shaped idea and now this time box
• 66:00 - 66:30 starts and um at in at base camp it was it was really really loose because I mean they are just stocked with senior people I mean they have so many very senior engineers and all the designers are coding I me they're very technical really really skilled people and U what I found is helpful when the team is a little bit more mixed if they're not all super senior is a simple exercise at kickoff take whatever was shaped and just draw a grid with nine
• 66:30 - 67:00 boxes and give me nine boxes of the nine major chunks that you think have to get implemented from an implementation standpoint so like translate this into nine major scopes of implementation that need to somehow happen over the time box it's a really really useful exercise to uh to kick things off and we have a lot of teams doing that now you know if you take six weeks that's like uh 30 business days you divide that by n it's like kind of like four days per box you know so
• 67:00 - 67:30 you're going to get a lot of clarity from a quick exercise and again this is done by the builders this is a really also good exercise for them to notice like oh wait a minute we think there's too much scope here even though it seemed reasonable when we put it into nine boxes it's like I you know I don't think we can do this All or it's also a good moment where somebody who's more Junior might kind of describe their implementation approach and then someone who's senior can review that and say actually you know we've done that before
• 67:30 - 68:00 and we'll run into this trouble if we don't use this other thing you know so those kind of really nice kind of coaching moments can happen so this is like if you were to try this approach and have a shaping session this is a sign you're heading in a good direction is a if the output the team that's building it can come up with nine and is it like more like does it have to be nine is it like six cool 10 cool uh what I found is um if if it's uh if it's more than 10 then you just get into ticket
• 68:00 - 68:30 land of here's a million things I have to do you know what I mean if you have a hundred things it's like that doesn't tell me anything but if it has to be nine or less you know nine or less okay uh I actually think I I actually think I'm I'm I'm speculating here but you know the ux designers in your audience will know about this rule of seven plus or minus two it's this cognitive science principle that was found about how many things someone can hold in their at once yeah and uh so this nine is the upper
• 68:30 - 69:00 limit of s plus or minus 2 and it basically you know it's kind of like do we actually have a picture of what it means to build this that we can Al hold in our heads can we kind of see the whole castle so what I'm hearing is like if you're on a say agile scrum team today if you want to start trying this out it's schedule a shaping session assume it's six weeks to start try to get into come into it with a framing of like here's the problem we're trying to solve is that a good way thinking about it like the problem we're trying to solve yeah for sure the question is what
• 69:00 - 69:30 problem are we trying to solve you know because the shaping work is more what are our options for the solution you know and if the problem is too fuzzy and big if the problem is just calendar you know then the shaping is going to be this ever expanding never ending thing and we're not going to be able to get anywhere yeah okay so you spend like three hours maybe six hours like in the first session would you recommend like try to keep it to this many hours when you're first trying up no I wouldn't do that you know um I think um the the the key thing is
• 69:30 - 70:00 actually if you get to the point where you're trying to hold a shaping session and you manage to get product and Engineering into the same room to do it you are far along you're doing great if you're at that point you know so much of the challenge is getting to the point of kind of aligning between product and Engineering that we can keep we cannot have projects that are dragging and dragging and dragging we can't keep
• 70:00 - 70:30 ending in a place where like where this is the end of a Sprint or the end of a cycle and we still can't see the end of it you know or we have to make so many cuts and and and compromises at the last minute that it's not the quality of or it's it's not really matching what it was supposed to be in the first place when those problems are happening or you know also by the way this is surfacing at the exec level imagine you know you're the CPO you're the CTO and you are supposed to be answering to uh how's that how's that work going right and
• 70:30 - 71:00 it's like well actually you know we're working on it I mean oh I I can I I can just think of a couple times when I needed to go to Jason and and and and he expected me to be making progress on something and I had gotten nowhere on it you know and that feeling you know when you were with top leadership in the room and you don't have a good answer for where you are on something is like oh it's it's brutal right and then from the CEO perspective it's like where's the movement we're running a business here like really nothing is shipping still you know this
• 71:00 - 71:30 is like this can't just keep happening you know so there's some recognition somewhere either at the top higher levels or within the team you know of like we don't want to keep dragging we don't want to keep being lost in the weeds and then this can be the you know like the activation energy like you gather the power to be like okay we actually want to try something different and in that case what I would say is what usually works best is okay we're
• 71:30 - 72:00 going to try a pilot project and what we want to do is as you said kind of choose a problem that's important enough to all of us that we think it's meaningful it's going to be worth you know trying to do well and it doesn't have to be six weeks it could be something that is a little bit smaller maybe you feel comfortable taking on a three-week thing for the first time what's important is just matching matching these things together right here's a problem that we actually care about it's timely something that we would like to be shipped soon it's not
• 72:00 - 72:30 so small that we're not going to actually learn this new muscle you know uh and it's big enough that it's going to feel like we really achieved something right so maybe that's going to be four weeks maybe it's going to be six maybe it's three I don't know and then kind of getting to a place where we have uh uh uh we wrestle a bit with the problem to get the problem narrowed down we get into our shaping session and then we do our best do you know what I mean and usually what happens too is if we have an engineering team that's
• 72:30 - 73:00 going to become free to do this work for those X number of weeks that's the upper limit on how long we can spend a shape right and that's another kind of like real life thing is sometimes we talk about like you know uh you know like if if on the one hand there's this universe of kind of never ending documents back and forth get F feedback and comments you know and then on the other hand there's like the team is going to be available we're trying to
• 73:00 - 73:30 actually do this so actually we've got a week to shape because engineering needs to kick off next week you know what I mean that's kind of a little bit more the real scenario when you're actually in this aligned world of like we want to we want to ship something now yeah real life constraints that's a really helpful way of yeah telling you how much time you have to do this for people that are just like this is like like I don't know any friends that are using this it's like weird this way of working like it's not a thing I hear about all the time uh
• 73:30 - 74:00 what can you say to them to help them be like okay I should actually give this a try here's like how many people are using it here's impact they you've seen anything you can share there to help them get over that home I would say um wait until it hurts more you know if if if if if the unfamiliarity is kind of the big problem with it you know then then maybe the things are fine I mean because it's not like this is the only way uh it's more like um I mean changing
• 74:00 - 74:30 is really hard you know and um if there's a good reason to do it and it's like look we've we've done it the old way we've tried different experiments you know we've even already churned through a new head of product or we've got a different CTO in you know and we're still having the same problems then there comes a point where it's like like I know that this is uncomfortable and I don't know somebody who's done it but you know like I think we need to try something different because we can't continue this way that is a great answer
• 74:30 - 75:00 following that same thread just what are signs that it's time to try something like what sort of pain do you often see that's like okay this is you shouldn't look into this seriously you know there are pains all along the journey so I mean I think um the the the place where it's most obvious is at the end of the line when we thought we were going to be done and this thing is just dragging and dragging and dragging right
• 75:00 - 75:30 like the teams like we're not shipping things we're running in place we keep going in circles on this like we don't see the end of course that's kind of like the culmination you know but there's also a lot of pain points along the way so there's if we go all the way Upstream you know there's if we go to the source of a project right sales talk to a customer you know what I mean or sales talk to a lead and we and and want us they have this idea of this thing we need to build right or the CEO had this idea in the shower the other day or the
• 75:30 - 76:00 product team did a whole bunch of research and they have a big case for why this is the thing that's important to build next whatever it is there's there's a there's a source right for the from the business perspective of like this is the thing we should do next if it's if if we just say dashboard and we don't negotiate what that means if we just say calendar and we don't negotiate like what that actually is then uh what do we experience this kind of fuzzy fuzzy thing where you know like
• 76:00 - 76:30 it's really hard to get to a conclusive answer about like yeah that's what we need to go do you know it's kind of like the ever expanding blob you know so if we've if you've felt that before that's already a first pain and then of course where does it go from there so we say calendar so we don't know what it means but we say calendar so now we give it to product and we've either got a whole bunch of figma files or we have the PRD with a million requirements about what a great calendar is you know and of course
• 76:30 - 77:00 you know I don't want to be cruel to the people who are putting their hearts into that work because the figma file is beautiful you know it's just coming a little early right and the PRD is full of a lot of true things that are probably really important for decision-making in the project but the way that it's packaged at that moment isn't something that gets absorbed you know I mean you to write this document and who I mean who actually I'm sorry like who actually reads it you know what I mean like and I
• 77:00 - 77:30 know it's painful but it's like that you know and then even when we try to read it because it wasn't shaped and we didn't get down to it's this it's that it's that and that's how it works it's hard to it's hard to walk away from reading that and kind of have anything that's in your head you know as like this is what we're going to go build it's kind of like a million puzzle pieces that you're going to have to solve right so what we see is either you know there's the figma file and then
• 77:30 - 78:00 there's the push back from Engineers you know there's the there's the um the PRD but then it's like okay but we still don't actually know what to build there's kind of all those things where instead of moving forward there's like more and more questions more and more push back more and more going back to the drawing board so that's another kind of big indicator that something is going wrong and then uh and then when we're in the building and we thought we knew what we agreed to we thought we all said yeah this is what we want to go make and it's just more and more questions coming out
• 78:00 - 78:30 you know more and more unexpected complexity things that we didn't anticipate you know and it's just it just doesn't feel like we're getting warmer and and coming closer it just feels like it's getting harder and harder you know those are all those are all the signs that like whatever process you use you know that there's a lack of there's a lack of clear shaping and there's a lack of clear framing because there's a lack of clarity right around what it is that we're doing before we started recording you made this interesting point that there's always talk of feature factories and that uh
• 78:30 - 79:00 rarely are they actually like efficient factories like they don't actually work yeah talk about that yeah well I understand what the feature Factory critique is supposed to be uh it's actually to the framing point of um we're not negotiating the value and the outcome we're trying to get from something we're just kind of taking it and building it you know and then of course in the end uh according to the feature Factory critique we just built it because somebody said we should build it and then people didn't use it and
• 79:00 - 79:30 didn't value it and the product is just getting bloated right the thing is that like I would say if you have a feature Factory meaning you're continually cranking out features you're probably quite healthy all you need to do is feed a different input to the beginning of the factory right what most teams are struggling with is that they can't they can't they don't have predictable repeatable shipping of things you you know I mean at least from my experience the bigger really widespread struggle is
• 79:30 - 80:00 like stuff isn't moving it's dragging I can't see the end I'm losing my like I'm feeling burned out you know what I mean like it's not exciting to work on this anymore like all that kind of a thing maybe last question here is what's what's kind of like The Sweet Spot stage for a company to start using shape up I know you basically worked in this way from the very beginning when it was just three people what do you find is like startups that are just starting out start working this way or do you find it's more useful later on we didn't formalize it until we had to and there
• 80:00 - 80:30 was a long time where there wasn't a fixed length for projects there was just an understanding of the urgency and kind of a feeling of what too long felt like you know and it didn't actually click into oh this is a cycle length and this is six weeks and then we pause and this is how this is who comes together to make the decision of like what's the next project and here's who is mainly doing the shap you know what I mean like all that stuff didn't get solved until we had reached a certain size usually the main Tipping Point if we start from smaller to big is you know there's a
• 80:30 - 81:00 phase when the founders are still involved in everything and so it doesn't matter what your process is it's going to be fine but then you start to hire the first other people and then for the first time you try to delegate some of those things and the founders try to be less involved and that's often where a lot of these problems start to appear and the founders start to ask themselves like we used to be fast and now we hired people because we needed to scale but now we're slow you know so like how will
• 81:00 - 81:30 we be fast again because we know what it's like if we if we just got back in there as Founders and you know got our hands dirty like we could make this go but how do I get how do I get these like the people that we've brought in to make these make these tradeoffs and make these decisions and how do I get the work to flow again you know so that's something that we definitely see there so that's a really good moment I'm onboarding new people I don't know what to tell them how to work I don't want to introduce a bunch of scrum rituals just
• 81:30 - 82:00 winging it on conon isn't working because they don't have enough Clarity I run what to go after so I have to babysit them all the time you know what I mean like these kinds of things there is another extreme which is um uh we've already gone past that you know we've been scrum or whatever for years you know um the the company has been growing like revenue is coming in like sales is doing their job like things are
• 82:00 - 82:30 running but man nothing is getting out the door and we're years in and we have an entrenched development we have like an entrenched engineering team which is a wall away from an entrenched kind of product team and everybody's apart and this thing is like we're like stuck and and that is more where there's going to be some tensions that are starting to appear at the executive level there's going to be some finger pointing there's going to be some like why isn't this moving why isn't this happening how can we be spending so much money in all
• 82:30 - 83:00 these engineers and we're not like don't have anything to show for it you know and that's a point where uh there can be kind of a so hard some hard conversations need to start happening about how do we actually start to negotiate around how we spend time and we can't just have endless refactorings and infrastructure projects but we need to be actually building things that that we can sell again what an idea yeah you know but it can you know there are a lot of um kind of uh engineering ORS that
• 83:00 - 83:30 have been standing around for a while you know and it's all refactoring all day and Tech debt and stuff like that and there's reasons why all those things got there but there comes a point where we have to figure out how to cut through it and make some hard choices so that we can carve out time to to build the stuff that's actually going to to be needle moving again and not just sustaining us where we are to like run in place imagine this latter bucket is who you mostly work with the kind of companies that bring you in actually it's been so
• 83:30 - 84:00 far a lot of the it's been a lot of the folks who still remember what it was like to be fast and they're kind of newly too big and they don't like being slow I've had a lot of that I actually think that there is I think that your intuition is right that the the market for the last category is the biggest but um it's hard it's hard to reach them uh it's it's not easy to talk about these things these are sensitive topics do you know what I mean like our engineering team isn't shipping you know and like
• 84:00 - 84:30 it's like the and it's happening at leadership level there's a ton of complaints happening deeper in the org but none of nobody down in the org can change anything and at the end of the day it's actually the interface at the executive level of being able to say how are we using our time like we we have to change something to make it even more Concrete in that first bucket what's like the size of org that you find is most in to this is like how many Engineers or is it like when they hire the first PM like what's kind of the I sometimes have the like how the heck do
• 84:30 - 85:00 I hire the first pm and what do they do conversation you know but um usually it's later than that it's after they hired the first PM after they hired the second pm and maybe even the third you know and they're kind of getting to like the product and Engineering together are like 30 50 people you know and it's like we we thought we put everybody in the right roles we kind of did what we were supposed to do and everything is just is grinding and like why are we so slow perfect so 30 to 50ish people seems like
• 85:00 - 85:30 a good time to that's probably like like basically you're finding that's when things start to really break down that's when they show themselves you know and I think uh I mean if if someone kind of hears this and it all starts to make sense and they're earlier in that wave then of course the earlier that you can anticipate it the better right yeah that's a good point this is when it's too late is when they come out I I I mainly hear about it when it's too late you know that's why they're reaching out got it so maybe closer to 30 okay but I think I I really think honestly I think it starts the first project where for
• 85:30 - 86:00 example the the founding Engineers hands off and then the the new hire is is taking over responsibility or the the the the the person who was like sort of founder CEO is like first giving it to a PM to kind of thinking they're going to carry it through you know and then it's not exactly meeting their expectations of what they thought was going to happen you know I think that's when those disconnects actually start it's it's the first step away from the work where the seeds of all of these problems actually start I want to talk about base camp and
• 86:00 - 86:30 how maybe not every company can operate like base camp before we get there is there anything else along the lines of shape up that you want to add or share yeah there's there's one key thing um which is um the role of the PM I think what we see today out of necessity in a lot of teams is that the PMS spend a lot of time um kind of faing around inside of the build phase inside the time box to try and make sure that
• 86:30 - 87:00 you know people aren't stock and and getting lost in the weeds and try to keep things moving you know and um it can sometimes be too close to project management rather than product management you know and what we see in really In Shape Up teams when they hit their stride is that the PM moves Upstream so the PM is less busy with how do I get this project to like not be in a bad State when it's getting built and
• 87:00 - 87:30 they're way more in how do I understand the the the business context how do I narrow down the problem how do I negotiate back and forth with maybe the CPO who kind of brought this to me to understand where the core of it is that that really getting deeper understanding of the business and the problem and the customer domain and like what problem is worth solving and what's even slice of that problem is the valuable slice to to argue that we should spend a few weeks
• 87:30 - 88:00 on you know that's the place where the PMs can really contribute a lot in in The Shape Up world they're that's kind of what they do rather than shepherding the process or being a ritual master or something like that that sounds pretty wonderful I've been doing some thinking about what a world an AI oriented world does to the role of PM and it feels like very similar to that actually where the building now is going to happen for you with AI tooling and that means the bigger question I was like what the hell
• 88:00 - 88:30 should I build and is the thing I built right and correct and likely to work and it feels like this is similar it's like the PM spending a lot more time up front thinking through what to build and then the building is more a lot more hands off so hands off it gets done in like five minutes when you're just like well build this thing for me but there it is yeah let's see let's see yeah let's see I'm I'm I'm also very curious yeah oh man what a wild time okay let's talk about base camp uh I think we talked about this ahead of the podcast that I
• 88:30 - 89:00 think you you want people to know that it's uh base camp is very unique and not everyone can work the way base camp works just talk about your Insight there and advice there when people see all this advice coming out of base camp I got to tell you I had no idea how unique we were until I was outside and there are so many things for example it's a lot of the things that people asked me about that are kind of not in the book that started to reveal those things to me you know that's so many things that I was just taking for granted I mean every designer
• 89:00 - 89:30 codes imagine if every designer codes and not and I don't just mean html I mean like running the app locally going into the place where that view is rendered to make that thing look the way that they want it to look or or whatever right I mean like really codes every designer so every designer where's the wall between design and Engineering where is that where's the moment where you arrive with the figma
• 89:30 - 90:00 file and then all of your you like the disappointment and all of the your hopes get destroyed because the engineers telling you no right like those moments don't even exist right in that world and then also uh I think also there was this lack of distance between sort of the business objective the thing that we're trying to the reason we want to maybe do this project and the blessing of the founders and the like there wasn't this kind of you know Executives far away
• 90:00 - 90:30 with some big targets and then some layer of PM and then some building I mean the founders were always there right there in the problem definition still I mean I can't say today but I mean up until 2021 when I was still there you know so it meant that there was so much Clarity all the time around what we're solving and why and why we're making time for it and then of course on the engineering side as well I mean imagine you have no sales
• 90:30 - 91:00 or you have no marketing that all of sale selling and marketing is happening by the Unicorn Founders so it means that there isn't contention for engineering time that there isn't kind of like all these different uh sources of requests that you have to wrestle with you know and David did such an extraordinary job of I mean the more I see the world world the more I'm amazed at how every six weeks
• 91:00 - 91:30 there was clear runway in engineering of like we have time or whatever the whatever we agree together is the most important thing just blank check like six weeks at a time you not a blank check but you know what I mean like a blank six weeks yeah uh again and again and again years without end you know keeping that engineering capacity focused on on Readiness for product you know and and totally leaning into like what's exciting to do to build for the
• 91:30 - 92:00 product and not getting lost in all this refactoring and new infrastructure and Technical dead and stuff like that I mean that's those are amazing so those are some really big differences and um it doesn't mean that you have to be base camp to do shape up but what it does mean is that when we say oh just have a shaping session and if you have the the pressure of the time box then you can make trade-offs together it's like well if if if we are used to having a big wall between for example engineering and design then we're going to have to learn
• 92:00 - 92:30 uh somebody who wants to start shaping is going to have to learn like well oh I need to figure out kind of who to bring together and how to have that session and how do we interact with each other so that we're combining all of that knowledge that maybe at base camp was all in the same head in a lot of cases this is such an important point for people to hear because there's so many people that come on podcasts like this and share here's here how to do it based on their experience and there's so many just uh assumptions about their resources the people they hire the way
• 92:30 - 93:00 the founders operate like no sales team I think that's like I don't even think about that yeah imagine you never no such thing as a request from sales yeah no such thing as pressure of like we need this thing in order to upsell right or to close this deal never it sounds like you're kind of in this like base camp by the way was it called 37 signals like it's interesting call Base Camp not 37 signal yeah I mean so uh it's just like the timing of when I left you know we were originally 37 signals and then base camp
• 93:00 - 93:30 became so big that we renamed ourselves to base camp I didn't know that yeah and then so for example like on the book you know on the it's it says Shape Up and there's a base camp logo on the bottom not a 37 signals logo you know but then they since uh went back uh uh so it's 37 signals again so I sometimes struggle with I don't know what to call it you know but it's both whatever whatever people can recognize it's the same you know it's same Powerhouse okay cool I'm glad I'm not the only one that's confused but 37 signals the current name great yeah uh so you said that it kind
• 93:30 - 94:00 of felt like you left and it was like this bubble you got out of what was was there like a moment where you're like you wrote this book everyone you're like hey this is how you should work and then you're like oh wait this doesn't actually work in real life for a lot of people is there a moment there it wasn't that this doesn't work I was just in a like a foreign country you know it was like um we tried it and it didn't work you know one of the common things I would hear is um the projects kept running over you know we weren't finishing them at the end of the cycle
• 94:00 - 94:30 they kept running over and running over and then I would be like huh so can you show me your shaping work and then they would show me a PRD I'd be like like well that's not that doesn't look like what's in the book and then uh and then I and again like can you show me your shaping work and they'd show me like a bunch of figma files you know and then and then what I started to understand was like we have some people in a role who were used to making a certain artifact at a certain step and they just kind of kept
• 94:30 - 95:00 doing that you know and um I didn't appreciate it took me a while to realize like there's no engineer in the picture here and uh and it was when we started to actually do the course I well I I did actually a couple projects where I helped teams handson and I learned that they they it was the first actually Consulting project I did where I helped team who was stuck and what we did was we we we chose the engineer who was best
• 95:00 - 95:30 suited to come over to product and be there in the shaping and that was the moment when it was like ah now I'm in the world I know again when we when we had all of that mixed in the same room again and so that was kind of like that was really something I mean it was a total learning curve for me you know and there's a lot of things like that but that was for example a really big one it's like oh we have to get engineering in there you're the type of guest I most love having on this podcast because you basically work with many many companies study what's
• 95:30 - 96:00 working what's not you're like in you're not like in the clouds pontificating about something and you're like working with teams to make things better and then you take all of that learning put it into a book and share with us all and so the ROI is just incredible for us all because you've spent so much time doing this and you've actually done the work you're not just in theory about it so so this is amazing uh but we're not done yet uh one question I wanted to ask is Jason was tweeting that there's he's
• 96:00 - 96:30 working on a a follow-up shape of book what's happening there are you involved in that what's the story so I also saw the tweet and uh I have to admit I was a little surprised when I saw this tweet you know but I had had a conversation with Jason a year earlier and uh he reached out and he said hey you know we're thinking about doing a second edition of the book and my first reaction I mean I was imagine I was actually really in the middle of learning you know all these things that
• 96:30 - 97:00 teams need to learn in order to kind of catch up to what was natural for base camp to do and uh so for me it was like interesting I have a lot of new things I have a lot of new ideas maybe a sec collaborating on the second edition could make sense but what I understood was that what he wanted to do was to kind of make an updated version of how of how they work because that's always been kind of a big thing of how I should I use the right name 37 signals of how they how they market and also how they
• 97:00 - 97:30 lead is they like to really show a clear example not like this is how you could do it this is how some people do it but like this is how we do it and I think it's their strength that they are very very clear like this is how we do it and kind of take it or leave it and what I understood was that if I did another version of the book that was just kind of how base camp does it I think it would leave so much opportunity on the table table like there's so many people where what they need to learn is more like how can it come closer to where I am if I have the wall today between
• 97:30 - 98:00 product and Engineering how do I bring the right people together into a shaping session how do we actually do that how do I overcome all of these little challenges because this is so far from our current way of working you know so the work that I'm doing with for example with shaping in real life is kind of all about those gaps and then I don't know what's going to be in the second edition you know because they are I guess someone there is going to be working on that but what I'm guessing is it's going to be an update on you know kind of up
• 98:00 - 98:30 on top of the mountain over here this is this is what base camp is doing so hopefully it'll be kind of a cool thing to look at as like here's a model of what they're doing and then the question is what can I take from that and what do I need in order to actually be able to make it work in the real situation I'm in you know and that's kind of where well that's my focus this is so interesting thank you for sharing sounds like a forky forked it and uh and these go going potentially in different directions but inspired by each other totally so
• 98:30 - 99:00 interesting Ryan is there anything else that you want to share before we wrap up one thing I could throw out there is um sometimes people reach out to me because their projects aren't shipping there's a lot of struggle there's a lot of lack of clarity but the root cause is actually that the input at the very beginning of of the process is too unclear or you know like we we don't actually know what's important to customers or we're
• 99:00 - 99:30 not actually sure where the value is or this kind of a thing you know so there is this link this framing step that we talked about of what is really the problem before we go into shaping this this is the link to product strategy also and this is the place where uh it can be really useful to reach for a lot of for example Bob mesta stuff with the jobs to be done and the demand side work of trying to get clear about things so that's the tool that I reach for at that phase and you can think of kind of this
• 99:30 - 100:00 you know before the problem definition there's this question of like what's the demand where are people struggling where is really the the the place the itch they're trying to scratch you know and then a lot of the shape up stuff is kind of when I have something where I think there's an opportunity or I think there's something meaningful there because of what we learned from customers or the job to be done re search or whatever it was now how do I turn that into something that we can actually go do and ship in a reasonable amount of time that's kind of the supply
• 100:00 - 100:30 side that's where the shape of part fits in so maybe it just might be cool for people to sort of see a link there that's a great uh plug for Bob mea episode we talked in depth about the jobs to be done framework and how to actually apply it what's the book you'd recommend there sounds like basically it's like shape up plus uh this book gives you a lot actually the one that I recommend the most is a demand side sales one 101 and it's funny because it's like sales you know especially for a product person like you're you're like I'm the
• 100:30 - 101:00 product person not the salesp person but it's it's uh it's such a good dive into what are people really trying to solve and and getting into that mindset of what's the struggle what's the problem I think that's a really good entry point for that yeah I don't love that title I feel like feel like you could have done better there with that book's title because it's you know what's what's interesting about it is that it's very very point for like if you are trying to make progress on sales then it's this other kind of sales this demand side sales you
• 101:00 - 101:30 know so I think maybe it's more for us who are kind of using it for different purposes like we're the product people trying to pull something out of it that it's a little bit less aligned but it's it's still useful yeah but basically it's like the the jobs to be done book as yeah it's kind of like the jobs to be done book that's a bit more tactical you know if if if you're really curious about the general Spirit of jobs to be done then competing against luck is a really good intro that's the one that Clayton Chris uh Klay Christensen wrote uh with a lot of uh uh I think I think I
• 101:30 - 102:00 think there's a lot of stuff that Bob worked on that's in there but uh but for a little bit more tactical like what's it look like to do the interview and how to think about the struggling moment and stuff like that this demand side sales is good for this strategy stuff awesome and we'll also link to his episode where you could get the gist of it in one hour's time oh that's right you did that that episode was great by the way that's yeah thanks Ryan okay we did it this was amazing I think this is going to help so many people uh we're not we're not done yet two final questions for you where can folks find
• 102:00 - 102:30 the book find you if they want to work with you anything else that you want to share and how can listeners be useful to you well they can find me at my website that's Ryan singer. I'm also on on X rjs I'm on LinkedIn you know so just reach me there and uh how can people be useful to me I love hearing from people who are having these problems you know like if you're having these problems where it's like things are dragging or we can't see the end and we're not getting the quality we need
• 102:30 - 103:00 and you know all this stuff like man this is I mean this is how I learn all this stuff is by talking to people who are in it you know so you know even if it's not clear what's the next step yet you know if that problem is real it would be cool to hear about it I'd love to chat be careful what you wish for Bob mea was just on the podcast and he uh told me he's got over hundred LinkedIn DMS with people sharing their struggles with their job search so here you go oh yeah but job moves that's a big one you know I think that's a broad appeal yeah
• 103:00 - 103:30 yeah that's true uh yeah I'm gonna ask you to explain the when you do Consulting work just like how does that work who's that for just because I know that's something else you do so it basically starts with uh either often first CPO or CTO often reaches out first you know and uh what I'm what when it works well is when we actually get them together you know and then they understand that they need to change something or we have like a head of product and a head of engineering that kind of a thing if those two are both seeing eye to eye that there's a problem
• 103:30 - 104:00 then we can start a conversation around okay so who would be the right people for a pilot team what are the things that are going on business-wise that could be a good pilot project and then I can kind of help to figure out like how do we actually so almost like guiding through like narrowing down that pilot project framing so that so that they have the support that it's going to be successful in shaping you know and then coaching the team so that they actually learn those shaping skills so that they can get through a session and come out with much more clarity like how do they
• 104:00 - 104:30 actually run those sessions you know so it's kind of first working with leadership who do we need to get to do this work who are the right people how do we bring them into a pilot project narrowing down doing some framing work on the pilot so it's going to be clearer in the shaping and then giving some guidance on how to get through that shaping with some feedback rounds this this is usually a good approach amazing and they can find this in your website if they want to explore this yes amazing Ryan thank you so much for being here yeah thanks a lot you had
• 104:30 - 105:00 amazing questions you know it's a subject that can go in so many directions and you kept bringing us onto some kind of a main track so I'm really pleased it was really nice thanks a lot do my best yeah thanks Ryan and bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more
• 105:00 - 105:30 about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode