A Visual Overview of Shaping (Shape Up Series)
A handy visual overview of the Shaping process and a bunch of handy Shape Up resources, including a presentation deck to get buy-in for Shaping at work
At the end of 2021 I finished reading Shape Up, a book by software product company Basecamp. The PDF-version of the book is available here for free (no registration required; click and download). Shape Up (SU) is one of the most concrete write-ups of the way of working of a scale-up software company, that I have ever read. SU discusses many concepts that result in a particular take on Product Management. I am covering Shape Up with a series of articles and this is the fourth article in that series.
This is a shorter post with mostly links to handy sources created by the community of Shape Up practitioners. There happens to be a forum related to Shape Up, which is truly a treasure trove of Shape Up goodies.
Shaping Process Visualised
Henning Witzel has created this lovely visual overview of all steps to Shaping:
Witzel identifies five steps to Shaping:
Raw Idea
Set Boundaries
Rough Out The Elements
Address Risks and Rabbit Holes
Write The Pitch
After these five steps of Shaping comes the Betting meeting, after which building commences in the six-week cycle.
I found this on the Shape Up Forum and also exists as a Miro board.
This is a fantastic way to orient yourself and tie the steps together into a coherent whole. Thanks Henning!
A Resource To Get Buy-In For Shaping
If you have read Shape Up and are enthusiastic about trying it out in your org, you need to introduce people to it. And some people will need some convincing. I found that it's hard to get them to invest into reading the book Shape Up, at least initially. Fair enough - I typically don't order a book either when I hear someone rave about some company's way of working. A great first step is a presentation about it. Luckily, Shape Up Forum user RubyK has created just that.
This resource I found at the Shape Up Forum. The deck is a Google Presentation and you can find it here (create a copy in your own Google account). Like the visual overview of Shaping by Henning, this is another example of a condensed overview of the key concepts in Shape Up.
Interestingly, this presentation mentions that there are four steps to shaping, compared to five steps in the visualisation to Henning. The preso doesn't see the Raw Idea as a (first) step.
It's 50 slides long, so it's definitely meaty and I will probably look for ways to cut it down for my first internal presentation, but the good news is that cutting down should be faster than creating the whole thing from scratch. Thanks to RubyK!
What parts of Shape Up would you like to read more about? Leave a comment!