Shape Up – by Ryan Singer
Date read: 2/12/20. Recommendation: 8/10.

One of the best guides out there for modern product development and the familiar challenges that product teams face. Part one aims to provide a better language to deal with and describe risks, uncertainties, and challenges that define product development. Part two outlines processes Basecamp (where Ryan leads product) uses to make meaningful progress on their products. The book mainly focuses on the risk of getting stuck or bogged down in last quarter’s work, wasting time on unexpected problems, and not being free to do what you want tomorrow.

See my notes below or download a free copy from Basecamp.

My Notes:

Part one aims to provide a better language to deal with and describe risks, uncertainties, and challenges that define product development. Part two outlines processes Basecamp uses to make meaningful progress on their products.

Focuses on the risk of getting stuck, the risk of getting bogged down in last quarter’s work, wasting time on unexpected problems, and not being free to do what you want to do tomorrow. 

Shaping:
Be critical about the problem—what are we trying to solve, why does it matter, what counts as success, which customers are affected, what is the cost of doing this instead of something else?

To set proper boundaries, you will need a raw idea, an appetite, and a narrow problem definition.

Well-shaped work has a thin-tailed probability distribution. Removes as many unknowns and tricky problems from the project as possible. Project should have independent, well-understood parts that assemble together in known ways.

Set the appetite:
How much time and attention is the raw idea worth? Is it worth a quick fix? Is it worth an entire cycle? Would we redesign what we have to accommodate for this? Or is this only worth it if we can pull it off with a small tweak?

Set the appetite. Start with a number and end with a design. This serves as a creative constraint. Estimates are the opposite and leave too much room for error.

Estimates are only beneficial or accurate when a team has done that exact task multiple times before. They don’t account for uncertainty as you’re trying to define what you actually need to do.

You are shaping for a fixed time window. 

Not, “is it possible to do X?” But, “Is X possible in 6 weeks?”

Scope hammering:
Hammer down scope by narrowing the problem definition.

Narrow understanding of the problem by flipping the question from “what could we build?” to “what’s really going wrong?” You want to understand what’s driving this request, where the workflow is breaking down without this feature.

When you get a request to build something, focus on the when instead of why. This will provide more context. “What was this person doing when the thought occurred to ask for this?”

Be cautious of “redesigns” or “refactoring” that aren’t driven by a clear problem or a single use case.

Critically assess the nice-to-haves. Ask, would this feature still be valuable without this?

The scope is right when…

1. You feel like you can see the whole project and nothing important that worries you is hidden down in the details.

2. Conversations become more flowing because the scope gives you the right language.

3. Easy to organize new tasks because you know the buckets they fit into.

“Every project is full of scope we don’t need. Every part of a product doesn’t need to be equally prominent, equally fast, and equally polished. Every use case isn’t equally common, equally critical, or equally aligned with the market we’re trying to sell to.”

Instead of trying to prevent scope from growing. Empower teams with the autonomy to cut back on scope themselves.

Good enough?
“The best is relative to your constraints.”

“We can only judge what is a ‘good’ solution in the context of how much time we want to spend and how important it is.” 

Anchor the point of comparison away from up towards the ideal and instead down towards the baseline. The baseline is the current reality for customers and how they solve this problem today. 

Seeing work in comparison to current alternative will improve morale and sense of progress made. 

Pitch:
Includes problem, appetite, solution, rabbit holes, and no-gos. See page 37 for more details.

Questions to ask at the betting table:
Does the problem matter? 

Is the appetite right?

Is the solution attractive?

What do we build first?
Start in the middle. Find something that’s 1) core to the concept, 2) small enough to complete in a few days and build momentum, 3) novel, meaning, something new that we haven’t worked on which will help eliminate uncertainty.

Choose the most important problems with the most unknowns to tackle first. This will help get you to the top of the hill. Then you can save the most routine and least worrisome items for the way down.