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Shape Up Book Summary

I read the book & highlighted the key ideas to create a distilled yet detailed version of the subject matter. Whether you’re looking to gauge if the full book is worth your time or want to revisit ideas you’ve already read, my summary should come in handy.

Book Summary of ‘Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles & Ship Work that Matters’ by ‘Ryan Singer’.

Chapter 1: Introduction

This book isn’t about the risk of building the wrong thing. Other books can help you with that (we recommend Competing Against Luck).

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

How the book is organized 

Part One is all about Shaping — the pre-work we do on projects before we consider them ready to schedule.

Part Two is about Betting — how we choose among the pitched projects and decide what to do six weeks at a time. 

Part Three is about Building — the expectations we place on the teams and the special practices they use to discover what to do.

Part 1: Shaping

Chapter 2: Principles of Shaping

When we shape the work, we need to do it at the right level of abstraction: not too vague and not too concrete. Product managers often err on one of these two extremes.

Wireframes are too concrete:

When design leaders go straight to wireframes or high-fidelity mockups, they define too much detail too early. This leaves designers no room for creativity.

Wireframes are too concrete:

On the other end of the spectrum, projects that are too vague don’t work either. When a project is defined in a few words, nobody knows what it means. Team members don’t have enough information to make trade-offs.

Shaped Software Design | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up ( Book )

Shaped Work Properties: It’s rough, It’s solved, It’s bounded

Taken together, the roughness leaves room for the team to resolve all the details, while the solution and boundaries act like guard rails. They reduce risk and channel the team’s efforts, making sure they don’t build too much, wander around, or get stuck.

Rough Sketch of the Dot Grid concept | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up ( Book )
Dot Grid User Interface | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up ( Book )

Who shapes

Shaping is creative and integrative. It requires combining interface ideas with technical possibilities with business priorities. To do that you’ll need to either embody these skills as a generalist or collaborate with one or two other people.

Shaping is primarily design work. The shaped concept is an interaction design viewed from the user’s perspective. It defines what the feature does, how it works, and where it fits into existing flows.

It’s also strategic work. Setting the appetite and coming up with a solution requires you to 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?

Two tracks

We have two separate tracks: one for shaping, one for building. During any six week cycle, the teams are building work that’s been previously shaped and the shapers are working on what the teams might potentially build in a future cycle.

Chapter 3: Set Boundaries

The conversation about building a feature always starts with a raw idea, like “customers are asking for group notifications.” Before we all go down the rabbit hole discussing ways we can solve it, we should first set some broad terms on the discussion to make it productive.

Setting the appetite

Sometimes an idea gets us excited right away. In that case we need to temper the excitement by checking whether this is really something we’re going to be able to invest time in or not. Other ideas are less exciting and feel more like a challenge we didn’t ask for. Whether we’re chomping at the bit or reluctant to dive in, it helps to explicitly define how much of our time and attention the subject deserves. 

We call this the appetite. You can think of the appetite as a time budget for a standard team size. We usually set the appetite in two sizes:

  • Small Batch: This is a project that a team of one designer and one or two programmers can build in one or two weeks. We batch these together into a six week cycle (more on that later).
  • Big Batch: This project takes the same-size team a full six-weeks.

Fixed time, variable scope

An appetite is completely different from an estimate. Estimates start with a design and end with a number. Appetites start with a number and end with a design. We use the appetite as a creative constraint on the design process.

We apply this principle at each stage of the process, from shaping potential projects to building and shipping them. First, the appetite constrains what kind of a solution we design during the shaping process. Later, when we hand the work to a team, the fixed time box pushes them to make decisions about what is core to the project and what is peripheral or unnecessary.

“Good” is relative

There’s no absolute definition of “the best” solution. The best is relative to your constraints. Without a time limit, there’s always a better version. The ultimate meal might be a ten course dinner. But when you’re hungry and in a hurry, a hot dog is perfect.

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.

Responding to raw ideas

Our default response to any idea that comes up should be:“Interesting. Maybe some day.” In other words, a very soft “no” that leaves all our options open. We don’t put it in a backlog. We give it space so we can learn whether it’s really important and what it might entail.

Narrow down the problem

We once had a customer ask us for more complex permission rules. It could easily have taken six weeks to build the change she wanted. Instead of taking the request at face value, we dug deeper. It turned out that someone had archived a file without knowing the file would disappear for everyone else using the system. Instead of creating a rule to prevent some people from archiving, we realized we could put a warning on the archive action itself that explains the impact. That’s a one-day change instead of a six-week project.

Watch out for grab-bags

When it comes to unclear ideas, the worst offenders are “redesigns” or “refactorings” that aren’t driven by a single problem or use case. 

When someone proposes something like “redesign the Files section,” that’s a grab-bag, not a project. It’s going to be very hard to figure out what it means, where it starts, and where it ends. 

Here’s a more productive starting point: “We need to rethink the Files section because sharing multiple files takes too many steps.” 

Now we can start asking: What’s not working? In what context are there too many steps? What parts of the existing design can stay the same and what parts need to change?

Chapter 4: Find the Elements

Now that we have the constraints of an appetite and the problem we’re solving, it’s time to get from an idea in words to the elements of a software solution. 

To stay on the right level of detail and capture our thoughts as they come, we work by hand using a couple of prototyping techniques: breadboarding and fat marker sketches.

Breadboarding

We borrow a concept from electrical engineering to help us design at the right level of abstraction. A breadboard is an electrical engineering prototype that has all the components and wiring of a real device but no industrial design.

Breadboarding & Software Design | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up ( Book )

Deciding to include an indicator light and a rotary knob is very different from debating the chassis material, whether the knob should go to the left of the light or the right, how sharp the corners should be, and so on.

Similarly, we can sketch and discuss the key components and connections of an interface idea without specifying a particular visual design. To do that, we can use a simple shorthand. There are three basic things we’ll draw:

  1. Places: These are things you can navigate to, like screens, dialogs, or menus that pop up.
  2. Affordances: These are things the user can act on, like buttons and fields. We consider interface copy to be an affordance, too. Reading it is an act that gives the user information for subsequent actions.
  3. Connection lines: These show how the affordances take the user from place to place.

We’ll use words for everything instead of pictures. The important things are the components we’re identifying and their connections. They allow us to play out an idea and judge if the sequence of actions serves the use case we’re trying to solve.

An example of using the breadboarding technique in software design | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up ( Book )

Fat marker sketches

Sometimes the idea we have in mind is a visual one. Breadboarding would just miss the point because the 2D arrangement of elements is the fundamental problem. In that case, we still don’t want to waste time on wireframes or unnecessary fidelity. Instead we use fat marker sketches.

A fat marker sketch is a sketch made with such broad strokes that adding detail is difficult or impossible.

Fat Marker Sketch Software Prototyping Technique | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up ( Book )

Elements are the output: 

Example elements:

  • A 2-up monthly calendar grid
  • Dots for events, no spanned pills
  • Agenda-style list of events below that scrolls an event into view when you tap a dot

This list of elements is extremely narrow and specific compared to “monthly calendar.”

Room for designers

By leaving details out, the breadboard and fat marker methods give room to designers in subsequent phases of the project.

This is a theme of the shaping process. We’re making the project more specific and concrete, but still leaving lots of space for decisions and choices to be made later. This isn’t a spec. It’s more like the boundaries and rules of a game. It could go in countless different ways once it’s time to play.

Not deliverable yet

What we’ve done is landed on an approach for how to solve the problem. But there may be some significant unknowns or things we need to address before we’d consider this safe to hand off to a team to build successfully.

The next step is to do some stress-testing and de-risking. We want to check for holes and challenges that could hinder the project from shipping within the fixed time appetite that we have in mind for it.

No conveyor belt

At this stage, we could walk away from the project. We haven’t bet on it. We haven’t made any commitments or promises about it. What we’ve done is added value to the raw idea by making it more actionable. We’ve gotten closer to a good option that we can later lobby for when it’s time to allocate resources.

Chapter 5: Risk & Rabbit Holes

Remember that we’re shaping work for a fixed time window. We may trust from our experience that the elements we fleshed out in the previous chapter are buildable within the appetite (six weeks). But we need to look closer, because all it takes is one hole in the concept to derail that. Suppose we bet on the project and a team takes it on. If they run into an unanticipated problem that takes two weeks to solve, they just burned a third of the budget!

Even worse, sometimes you run into problems that don’t just delay the project—they have no apparent solution. 

Of course there will always be unknowns. That’s why we apply the many practices in Part Three so that teams tackle the right problems in the right order, leaving room for the unexpected. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for the pitfalls we can find up front and eliminate them before betting on the project. Before we consider it safe to bet on, a shaped project should be as free of holes as possible.

Different categories of risk

In terms of risk, well-shaped work looks like a thin-tailed probability distribution. There’s a slight chance it could take an extra week but, beyond that, the elements of the solution are defined enough and familiar enough that there’s no reason it should drag on longer than that.

Thin Tailed Distribution in Shipping Software | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up ( Book )

However, if there are any rabbit holes in the shaping—technical unknowns, unsolved design problems, or misunderstood interdependencies—the project could take multiple times the original appetite to complete. The right tail stretches out.

Fat Tailed Distribution in Shipping Software | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up ( Book )

We want to remove the unknowns and tricky problems from the project so that our probability is as thin-tailed as possible. That means a project with independent, well-understood parts that assemble together in known ways.

Look for rabbit holes

Fleshing out the elements of the solution was a fast-moving, exploratory process. It was more breadth than depth. In this step, we slow down and look critically at what we came up with.

We ask ourselves questions like:

  • Does this require new technical work we’ve never done before?
  • Are we making assumptions about how the parts fit together?
  • Are we assuming a design solution exists that we couldn’t come up with ourselves?
  • Is there a hard decision we should settle in advance so it doesn’t trip up the team?

Declare out of bounds

Since everyone on the team wants to do their best work, they will of course look for all the use cases to cover and consider them necessary. As the team gets more comfortable with scope hammering, this improves. But it’s still a good idea to call out any cases you specifically aren’t supporting to keep the project well within the appetite.

Cut back

There may be parts of the solution we got excited about during the sketching phase that aren’t really necessary. Mention it to the team as a nice-to-have, but everyone should start from the assumption that the feature is valuable without it.

Present to technical experts

Beware the simple question: “Is this possible?” In software, everything is possible but nothing is free. We want to find out if it’s possible within the appetite we’re shaping for. Instead of asking “is it possible to do X?” ask “is X possible in 6-weeks?” That’s a very different question.

Talk through the constraints of how this is a good solution given the appetite, so they’re partners in keeping the project at the size you intend. And emphasize that you’re looking for risks that could blow up the project. It’s not just a “what do you think” conversation—we’re really hunting for time bombs that might blow up the project once it’s committed to a team.

Depending on how the conversation goes, you may either have validated your approach or discovered some problems that send you back for another round of shaping.

De-risked and ready to write up

At the end of this stage, we have the elements of the solution, patches for potential rabbit holes, and fences around areas we’ve declared out of bounds. 

Chapter 6: Write the Pitch

The purpose of the pitch is to present a good potential bet. It’s basically a presentation. The ingredients are all the things that we need to both capture the work done so far and present it in a form that will enable the people who schedule projects to make an informed bet.

There are five ingredients that we always want to include in a pitch:

  1. Problem — The raw idea, a use case, or something we’ve seen that motivates us to work on this
  2. Appetite — How much time we want to spend and how that constrains the solution
  3. Solution — The core elements we came up with, presented in a form that’s easy for people to immediately understand
  4. Rabbit holes — Details about the solution worth calling out to avoid problems
  5. No-gos — Anything specifically excluded from the concept: functionality or use cases we intentionally aren’t covering to fit the appetite or make the problem tractable

Part 2: Betting

Chapter 7: Bets, Not Backlogs

No backlogs

Backlogs are a big weight we don’t need to carry. Dozens and eventually hundreds of tasks pile up that we all know we’ll never have time for. The growing pile gives us a feeling like we’re always behind even though we’re not.

A few potential bets

So what do we do instead? Before each six-week cycle, we hold a betting table where stakeholders decide what to do in the next cycle. At the betting table, they look at pitches from the last six weeks — or any pitches that somebody purposefully revived and lobbied for again.

Nothing else is on the table. There’s no giant list of ideas to review. There’s no time spent grooming a backlog of old ideas. There are just a few well-shaped, risk-reduced options to review. The pitches are potential bets.

Decentralized lists

We don’t have to choose between a burdensome backlog and not remembering anything from the past. Everyone can still track pitches, bugs, requests, or things they want to do independently without a central backlog.

This approach spreads out the responsibility for prioritizing and tracking what to do and makes it manageable. People from different departments can advocate for whatever they think is important and use whatever method works for them to track those things—or not.

Important ideas come back

It’s easy to overvalue ideas. The truth is, ideas are cheap. They come up all the time and accumulate into big piles.

Really important ideas will come back to you. When’s the last time you forgot a really great, inspiring idea? 

Chapter 8: The Betting Table

Six-week cycles

We wanted a cycle that would be long enough to finish a whole project, start to end. At the same time, cycles need to be short enough to see the end from the beginning. People need to feel the deadline looming in order to make trade-offs. If the deadline is too distant and abstract at the start, teams will naturally wander and use time inefficiently until the deadline starts to get closer and feel real.

Six weeks is long enough to finish something meaningful and still short enough to see the end from the beginning.

Cool-down

After each six-week cycle, we schedule two weeks for cool-down. This is a period with no scheduled work where we can breathe, meet as needed, and consider what to do next.

During cool-down, programmers and designers on project teams are free to work on whatever they want. After working hard to ship their six-week projects, they enjoy having time that’s under their control. They use it to fix bugs, explore new ideas, or try out new technical possibilities.

Team and project sizes

Our project teams consist of either one designer and two programmers or one designer and one programmer. They’re joined by a QA person who does integration testing later in the cycle.

These teams will either spend the entire cycle working on one project, or they’ll work on multiple smaller projects during the cycle. We call the team that spends the cycle doing one project the big batch team and the team working on a set of smaller projects the small batch team.

The betting table

The betting table is a meeting held during cool-down where stakeholders decide what to do in the next cycle.

Our betting table at Basecamp consists of the CEO (who in our case is the last word on product), CTO, a senior programmer, and a product strategist.

The output is a cycle plan. Between everyone present, there’s knowledge of who’s available, what the business priorities are, and what kind of work we’ve been doing lately. There’s no “step two” to validate the plan or get approval. And nobody else can jump in afterward to interfere or interrupt the scheduled work.

The meaning of a bet

We talk about “betting” instead of planning because it sets different expectations.

First, bets have a payout. We’re not just filling a time box with tasks until it’s full. We’re not throwing two weeks toward a feature and hoping for incremental progress. We intentionally shape work into a six-week box so there’s something meaningful finished at the end. The pitch defines a specific payout that makes the bet worth making.

Second, bets are commitments. If we bet six weeks, then we commit to giving the team the entire six weeks to work exclusively on that thing with no interruptions. We’re not trying to optimize every hour of a programmer’s time. We’re looking at the bigger movement of progress on the whole product after the six weeks.

Third, a smart bet has a cap on the downside. If we bet six weeks on something, the most we can lose is six weeks. We don’t allow ourselves to get into a situation where we’re spending multiples of the original estimate for something that isn’t worth that price.

What about bugs?

First we should step back and question our assumptions about bugs.

There is nothing special about bugs that makes them automatically more important than everything else. The mere fact that something is a bug does not give us an excuse to interrupt ourselves or other people. All software has bugs. The question is: how severe are they? If we’re in a real crisis—data is being lost, the app is grinding to a halt, or a huge swath of customers are seeing the wrong thing—then we’ll drop everything to fix it. But crises are rare. The vast majority of bugs can wait six weeks or longer, and many don’t even need to be fixed. If we tried to eliminate every bug, we’d never be done. You can’t ship anything new if you have to fix the whole world first.

That said, nobody likes bugs. We still want ways to deal with them. Three strategies have worked for us.

  1. Use the cool-down period.
  2. Bring it to the betting table. If a bug is too big to fix during cool-down, it can compete for resources at the betting table. 
  3. Schedule a bug smash. Once a year—usually around the holidays—we’ll dedicate a whole cycle to fixing bugs. We call it a “bug smash.” 

Keep the slate clean

The key to managing capacity is giving ourselves a clean slate with every cycle. That means only betting one cycle at a time and never carrying scraps of old work over without first shaping and considering them as a new potential bet.

Chapter 9: Place Your Bets

Look where you are

Depending on whether we’re improving an existing product or building a new product, we’re going to set different expectations about what happens during the six-week cycle.

Existing products

When we add features to an existing product, we follow the standard Shape Up process: shape the work, bet on it, and give it to a team to build. We expect the team to finish and ship some version of the shaped work by the end of the cycle.

New products

New products are different. Whereas adding to an existing product is like buying a couch for a room with fixed dimensions, new product development is like figuring out where the walls and the foundation should go so the building will stand.

We’ve noticed three phases of work when we build a new product from scratch: R&D Mode, Production Mode, Cleanup Mode.

In each phase, the way that we shape and our expectations for how the team will work together during the cycle are different. These phases unfold over the course of multiple cycles, but we still only bet one cycle at a time.

Questions to ask:

Here are some common questions you might hear when people at the betting table are debating which bets to place.

Does the problem matter? Is the appetite right? Is the solution attractive? Is this the right time? Are the right people available?

Part 3: Building

Chapter 10: Hand Over Responsibility

We’ve made our bets and now it’s time to start the next cycle. How does the team get started?

Assign projects, not tasks

We don’t start by assigning tasks to anyone. Nobody plays the role of the “taskmaster” or the “architect” who splits the project up into pieces for other people to execute.

Splitting the project into tasks up front is like putting the pitch through a paper shredder. Everybody just gets disconnected pieces. We want the project to stay “whole” through the entire process so we never lose sight of the bigger picture.

Instead, we trust the team to take on the entire project and work within the boundaries of the pitch. The team is going to define their own tasks and their own approach to the work. They will have full autonomy and use their judgement to execute the pitch as best as they can.

Done means deployed

At the end of the cycle, the team will deploy their work. In the case of a Small Batch team with a few small projects for the cycle, they’ll deploy each one as they see fit as long as it happens before the end of the cycle.

This constraint keeps us true to our bets and respects the circuit breaker. The project needs to be done within the time we budgeted; otherwise, our appetite and budget don’t mean anything.

That also means any testing and QA needs to happen within the cycle. The team will accommodate that by scoping off the most essential aspects of the project, finishing them early, and coordinating with QA. 

Getting oriented

It’s important for managers to respect this phase. Teams can’t just dive into a code base and start building new functionality immediately. They have to acquaint themselves with the relevant code, think through the pitch, and go down some short dead ends to find a starting point. Interfering or asking them for status too early hurts the project. It takes away time that the team needs to find the best approach. The exploration needs to happen anyway. Asking for visible progress will only push it underground. It’s better to empower the team to explicitly say “I’m still figuring out how to start” so they don’t have to hide or disguise this legitimate work.

Imagined vs discovered tasks

The team naturally starts off with some imagined tasks—the ones they assume they’re going to have to do just by thinking about the problem. Then, as they get their hands dirty, they discover all kinds of other things that we didn’t know in advance. These unexpected details make up the true bulk of the project and sometimes present the hardest challenges.

Chapter 11: Get One Piece Done

Integrate one slice

We can think of projects in two layers: front-end and back-end, design and code. While technically speaking there are more layers than this, these two are the primary integration challenge in most projects.

What we want is to pick off one slice of the project to integrate. Then when that’s done, the team has something tangible that they’ve proven to work (or not work and reconsider). Anyone can click through the interaction and see if the feature does what it should and if what it does is what they want.

Programmers don’t need to wait

Because the important moving parts were already defined in the shaping process, programmers don’t need to sit idle waiting for design when the project starts. There’s enough direction in the pitch for them to start working on back-end problems from the start. 

Affordances before pixel-perfect screens

Programmers don’t need a pixel-perfect design to start implementing. All they need are endpoints: input elements, buttons, places where stored data should appear. These affordances are the core of a user interface design.

Questions about font, color, spacing, and layout can be resolved after the raw affordances are in place and hooked up in code. Copywriting, basic affordances, and some wiring are all we need to try a live working version in the browser or on the device. Then we can answer the fundamental questions early: Does it make sense? Is it understandable? Does it do what we want?

That means the first interface a designer gives to a programmer can look very basic, like the example below. It’s more like a breadboard than a visual design or a polished mock-up.

Basic Software Affordance Shared with the Programmer | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

Program just enough for the next step

The same is true for back-end work. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Sometimes a designer just needs some scaffolding—a couple fields that save data or some code to navigate from one stubbed screen to another. Other times she needs to populate a variable in the template with a collection of real data so she can iterate on different displays (rows, columns, media boxes, etc) to find the best design.

Three criteria to think about when choosing what to build first:

First, it should be core. Without it, the other work wouldn’t mean anything.

Second, it should be small. If the first piece of work isn’t small enough, there isn’t much benefit to carving it off from the rest. The point is to finish something meaningful in a few days and build momentum—to have something real to click on that shows the team is on the right track.

Third, it should be novel. If two parts of the project are both core and small, prefer the thing that you’ve never done before.

Chapter 12: Map the Scopes

Organize by structure, not by person

When asked to organize tasks for a project, people often separate work by person or role: they’ll create a list for Designers and a list for Programmers. This leads to the problem we talked about in the previous chapter—people will complete tasks, but the tasks won’t add up to a finished part of the project early enough.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the slices of work integrate front-end and back-end tasks. This allows us to finish one slice of the actual project and definitively move on. That’s better than having lots of pieces that—fingers crossed—are supposed to come together by the end of the cycle.

We call these integrated slices of the project scopes. We break the overall scope (singular) of the project into separate scopes (plural) that can be finished independently of each other.

The scope map

Imagine an overhead view of the project. At the beginning, there’s just an outline from the shaping work that preceded the project. There aren’t any tasks or scopes yet.

The Barebones of a Software Scope Map | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

When the team members take over the project, they start discovering tasks. Tasks are a natural starting point because they’re concrete and granular. It’s too early to organize them into higher level categories. It would be artificial to try and group them arbitrarily. It’s enough at the start just to capture a variety of things that need to happen.

Software Scope Map Work in Progress | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

But we don’t want to stay with this picture for long. It’s too low-level. There’s nothing visible from high altitude.

As the team starts doing real work on the project they learn how the tasks are related and what the structure of the project is really like. Then they become able to factor the project into scopes. This is like dividing the map of the project into separate territories.

Finished Software Scope Map | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

The scopes reflect the meaningful parts of the problem that can be completed independently and in a short period of time—a few days or less. They are bigger than tasks but much smaller than the overall project.

The language of the project

Scopes are more than just slices. They become the language of the project at the macro level.

When it’s time to report status, the team uses the language of scopes to explain what’s done and what’s not done. It’s more satisfying to have the conversation at a high level and point to finished pieces of software, instead of going down into the weeds and defending the purposes and status of individual outstanding tasks.

Discovering scopes

Scope mapping isn’t planning. You need to walk the territory before you can draw the map. Scopes properly drawn are not arbitrary groupings or categories for the sake of tidiness. They reflect the real ground truth of what can be done independently—the underlying interdependencies and relationships in the problem.

How to know if the scopes are right

Well-made scopes show the anatomy of the project. 

Three signs indicate when the scopes are right:

  1. You feel like you can see the whole project and nothing important that worries you is hidden down in the details.
  2. Conversations about the project become more flowing because the scopes give you the right language.
  3. When new tasks come up, you know where to put them. The scopes act like buckets that you can easily lob new tasks into.

On the other hand, these three signs indicate the scopes should be redrawn:

  1. It’s hard to say how “done” a scope is. This often happens when the tasks inside the scope are unrelated. If the problems inside the scope are unrelated, finishing one doesn’t get you closer to finishing the other.
  2. The name isn’t unique to the project, like “front-end” or “bugs.” We call these “grab bags” and “junk drawers.” This suggests you aren’t integrating enough, so you’ll never get to mark a scope “done” independent of the rest. For example, with bugs, it’s better to file them under a specific scope so you can know whether, for example, “Send” is done or if you need to fix a couple bugs first before putting it out of mind.
  3. It’s too big to finish soon. If a scope gets too big, with too many tasks, it becomes like its own project with all the faults of a long master to-do list. Better to break it up into pieces that can be solved in less time, so there are victories along the way and boundaries between the problems to solve.

Tips for dealing with different kinds of tasks and scopes that will come up.

Layer cakes

Work like this looks like a layer cake: You can judge the work by UI surface area because the back-end work is thin and evenly distributed. In these cases, you can integrate all design and programmer tasks together in the same scope.

Software Layer Cakes: Similar Scope for Front End & Back End | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

Icebergs

But sometimes there is significantly more back-end work than UI work or vice versa. This kind of work is like an iceberg.

Software Icebergs: Different Scope for Front End & Back End | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

For icebergs, it can help to factor out the UI as a separate scope of work (assuming the UI isn’t interdependent with the back-end complexity). If the back-end is complex enough, you can split it into separate concerns and then turn those into scopes as well. The goal in cases like this is to define some different things you can finish and integrate in stages, rather than waiting until the 11th hour with fingers crossed that it will all come together.

For both back-end and front-end icebergs, we always question them before accepting them as a fact. Is the complexity really necessary and irreducible? Do we need that fancy UI? Is there a different way to build that back-end process so it has fewer interdependencies with the rest of the system?

Chowder

There are almost always a couple things that don’t fit into a scope. We allow ourselves a “Chowder” list for loose tasks that don’t fit anywhere. But we always keep a skeptical eye on it. If it gets longer than three to five items, something is fishy and there’s probably a scope to be drawn somewhere.

Mark nice-to-haves with ~

In a world with no deadlines, we could improve everything forever. But in a fixed time box, we need a machete in our hands to cut down the constantly growing scope. The ~ at the start of an item, or even a whole scope, is our best tool for that.

Chapter 13: Show Progress

The tasks that aren’t there

Imagined Vs Discovered Software Tasks | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

If we tried to judge at t2 how far along the project is, we’d be misled. From an outsider’s perspective, there’s no way to know whether the number of outstanding tasks will go down or up. To know that, you’d need more context on the work inside the scope to understand what it means that those particular tasks are done and whether others might still be coming.

Estimates don’t show uncertainty

Recognizing this, we came up with a way to see the status of the project without counting tasks and without numerical estimates. We do that by shifting the focus from what’s done or not done to what’s unknown and what’s solved. To enable this shift, we use the metaphor of the hill.

Work is like a hill

Every piece of work has two phases. First there’s the uphill phase of figuring out what our approach is and what we’re going to do. Then, once we can see all the work involved, there’s the downhill phase of execution.

What Work Looks like | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

The uphill phase is full of uncertainty, unknowns, and problem solving. The downhill phase is marked by certainty, confidence, seeing everything, and knowing what to do.

Status without asking

We built a feature exclusive to Basecamp for creating hill charts and updating them with a few clicks. The team members, who have the full context of where the work stands, intuitively drag the scopes into position, and save a new update that’s logged on the project (see How to Implement Shape Up in Basecamp).

For managers, the ability to compare past states is the killer feature. It shows not only where the work stands but how the work is moving.

How Managers can track team's progress using Hill Charts | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

With this second-order view, managers can judge what’s in motion and what’s stuck. They can see which problems the team chose to solve and how much time they spent at each stage from unknown to known to done.

This report becomes the manager’s first destination when they feel anxious about a project. Since it’s self-serve, there’s no need to interrupt the team with the awkward status question. And in cases where something doesn’t look right, the manager can jump directly into a conversation about the relevant piece of work. “Looks like ‘Autosave’ has been uphill for a while. What’s the unknown that’s holding it back?” The manager can workshop this specific piece of the project without having to first untangle it from all the other things that are moving along as expected.

Nobody says “I don’t know”

Nobody wants to raise their hand to management and say “I don’t know how to solve this problem.” This causes teams to hide uncertainty and accumulate risk. 

The hill chart allows everybody to see that somebody might be stuck without them actually saying it. A dot that doesn’t move is effectively a raised hand: “Something might be wrong here.”

Work moving across a hill chart | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

Once it’s been spotted, the language of uphill/downhill facilitates the conversation. It’s less about the person (Looks like you’re stuck!) and more about the work. The question is: What can we solve to get that over the hill?

Prompts to refactor the scopes

Sometimes probing into a stuck scope reveals that it isn’t stuck at all. The problem is in how the lines of the scope were drawn.

Build your way uphill

Coming up with an approach in your head is just the first step uphill. We often have a theory of how we’ll solve something—“I’ll just use that API”—and then the reality turns out to be more complicated. It’s good to think of the first third uphill as “I’ve thought about this,” the second third as “I’ve validated my approach,” and the final third to the top as “I’m far enough with what I’ve built that I don’t believe there are other unknowns.”

Solve in the right sequence

Some scopes are riskier than others. Imagine two scopes: One involves geocoding data—something the team has never done before. The other is designing and implementing an email notification. Both have unknowns. Both start at the bottom of the hill. This is where the team asks themselves: If we were out of time at the end of the cycle, which of these could we easily whip together—despite the unknowns—and which might prove to be harder than we think?

That motivates the team to push the scariest work uphill first. Once they get uphill, they’ll leave it there and look for anything critically important before finishing the downhill work to completion. It’s better to get a few critical scopes over the top early in the project and leave the screw-tightening for later.

Chapter 14: Decide When to Stop

Compare to baseline

Instead of comparing up against the ideal, compare down to baseline—the current reality for customers. Seeing that our work so far is better than the current alternatives makes us feel better about the progress we’ve made. This motivates us to make calls on the things that are slowing us down. It’s less about us and more about value for the customer. It’s the difference between “never good enough” and “better than what they have now.” We can say “Okay, this isn’t perfect, but it definitely works and customers will feel like this is a big improvement for them.”

Compare new software development to current product baseline | Shape Up Book by Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Source: Shape Up Book

Limits motivate trade-offs

Recall that the six-week bet has a circuit breaker—if the work doesn’t get done, the project doesn’t happen.

This forces the team to make trade-offs. When somebody says “wouldn’t it be better if…” or finds another edge case, they should first ask themselves: Is there time for this? Without a deadline, they could easily delay the project for changes that don’t actually deserve the extra time.

Scope grows like grass

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.

Rather than trying to stop scope from growing, give teams the tools, authority, and responsibility to constantly cut it down.

Cutting scope isn’t lowering quality

Variable scope is not about sacrificing quality. We are extremely picky about the quality of our code, our visual design, the copy in our interfaces, and the performance of our interactions. The trick is asking ourselves which things actually matter, which things move the needle, and which things make a difference for the core use cases we’re trying to solve.

Scope hammering

As we come up with things to fix, add, improve, or redesign during a project, we ask ourselves:

Is this a “must-have” for the new feature? Could we ship without this? What happens if we don’t do this? Is this a new problem or a pre-existing one that customers already live with? How likely is this case or condition to occur? When this case occurs, which customers see it? Is it core—used by everyone—or more of an edge case? What’s the actual impact of this case or condition in the event it does happen? When something doesn’t work well for a particular use case, how aligned is that use case with our intended audience?

QA is for the edges

At Basecamp’s current size (millions of users and about a dozen people on the product team), we have one QA person. They come in toward the end of the cycle and hunt for edge cases outside the core functionality.

QA can limit their attention to edge cases because the designers and programmers take responsibility for the basic quality of their work. Programmers write their own tests, and the team works together to ensure the project does what it should according to what was shaped.

When to extend a project

In very rare cases, we’ll extend a project that runs past its deadline by a couple weeks. How do we decide when to extend a project and when to let the circuit breaker do its thing?

First, the outstanding tasks must be true must-haves that withstood every attempt to scope hammer them.

Second, the outstanding work must be all downhill. No unsolved problems; no open questions. Any uphill work at the end of the cycle points to an oversight in the shaping or a hole in the concept. Unknowns are too risky to bet on. If the work is uphill, it’s better to do something else in the next cycle and put the troubled project back in the shaping phase. If you find a viable way to patch the hole, then you can consider betting more time on it again in the future.

Chapter 15: Move On

Let the storm pass

Shipping can actually generate new work if you’re not careful. Feature releases beget feature requests. Suggestions for improvements come in.

The feedback can be especially intense if the feature you shipped changes existing workflows. Even purely visual changes sometimes spur intense pushback. A small minority of customers might overreact and say things like “You ruined it! Change it back!”

It’s important to stay cool and avoid knee-jerk reactions. Give it a few days and allow it to die down. Be firm and remember why you made the change in the first place and who the change is helping.

Stay debt-free

It can be tempting to commit to making changes in response to feedback, but then you no longer have a clean slate for the next cycle. Remember: these are just raw ideas coming in. The way to handle them is with a gentle “no.” Saying “no” doesn’t prevent you from continuing to contemplate them and maybe shape them up into future projects. Saying “yes,” on the other hand, takes away your freedom in the future. It’s like taking on debt.

Let the requests or bugs that just came up compete with everything else at the next betting table to be sure they’re strategically important.

Feedback needs to be shaped

Here we come full circle. The raw ideas that just came in from customer feedback aren’t actionable yet. They need to be shaped. They are the raw inputs that we talked about in step one of the shaping process: Set Boundaries.

If a request is truly important, you can make it your top priority on the shaping track of the next cycle.

Key concepts

  • Shaped versus unshaped work
  • Setting appetites instead of estimates
  • Designing at the right level of abstraction
  • Concepting with breadboards and fat marker sketches
  • Making bets with a capped downside (the circuit breaker) and honoring them with uninterrupted time
  • Choosing the right cycle length (six weeks)
  • A cool-down period between cycles
  • Breaking projects apart into scopes
  • Downhill versus uphill work and communicating about unknowns
  • Scope hammering to separate must-haves from nice-to-haves

More Books by Basecamp:

1. It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
2. REWORK
3. REMOTE: Office Not Required
4. Getting Real ( The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application )

We’ve created a list of books every aspiring/existing entrepreneur should read, and it’s nothing the book lists you will come across when you search for “Best Business Books” on Google. You can check out the list and our explanation of why we created it here.

 

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Muaaz Qadri
Muaaz Qadri
A Proud Computer Engineer turned Digital Marketer