# Appetite (Shape Up) In [[Shape Up]], appetite is the amount of time you're willing to spend on a piece of work, decided before designing the solution. It's a time budget, not a prediction. An estimate and an appetite run in opposite directions. In Ryan Singer's words, "Estimates start with a design and end with a number." An appetite starts with the number (how much is this problem worth to us?) and the design has to fit inside it. Shape Up uses two sizes: a small batch, one designer and one or two programmers for one or two weeks, and a big batch, the same team for a full six-week cycle. The appetite is what makes "fixed time, variable scope" work. The deadline stays put and the scope adapts, first during shaping and then through [[Scope hammering]] while building. It also changes what "good" means: a solution isn't good in absolute terms, only relative to how much time the problem deserves. For knowledge workers, estimating creative work is unreliable (see [[Hofstadter's Law]]), but deciding how much time something deserves is a choice you can always make. Jason Fried compares it to a budget: decide what you're willing to spend, then work within it. ## References - https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.2-chapter-03 - https://37signals.com/podcast/your-estimates-suck/ ## Related - [[Shape Up]] - [[Scope hammering]] - [[Iron Triangle]] - [[Task Weights]] - [[Hofstadter's Law]] - [[Parkinson's Law]] - [[Time blocking]] - [[Jason Fried]] - [[Project Management (MoC)]]