# Shape Up Shape Up is the product development method used at Basecamp, written up by Ryan Singer, then Basecamp's head of product strategy, in the book "Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters" (2019, free online, foreword by [[Jason Fried]]). The method has three parts: - **Shaping**: before anyone commits to it, a raw idea is turned into a rough but bounded solution. Shaping starts from an [[Appetite (Shape Up)|appetite]] (how much time the idea deserves), names the risks and rabbit holes, and ends in a pitch - **Betting**: during the cool-down between cycles, a betting table picks which pitches to bet on for the next cycle. There's no backlog: pitches that aren't picked aren't queued, and important ideas are expected to come back on their own - **Building**: a small team gets the whole shaped project and works out the tasks itself. Progress is shown on hill charts (from unknown, to solved, to done), and the team uses [[Scope hammering]] to ship within the time box Work runs in six-week cycles followed by a two-week cool-down for bugs, small tasks and the next betting table. A circuit breaker applies: a project that doesn't ship within its cycle isn't extended by default; it has to be reshaped and pitched again. The central idea is fixed time, variable scope, the reverse of the usual approach of fixing the scope and estimating the time. Several pieces work outside product teams, including for solo work: setting an appetite instead of estimating, a hard time box, scope hammering, and ending work that overruns instead of extending it. ## References - https://basecamp.com/shapeup - https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.2-chapter-03 (Set Boundaries) - https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1-chapter-07 (Bets, Not Backlogs) - https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.2-chapter-08 (The Betting Table) - https://basecamp.com/shapeup/3.5-chapter-14 (Decide When to Stop) ## Related - [[Appetite (Shape Up)]] - [[Scope hammering]] - [[Iron Triangle]] - [[Scope creep]] - [[Idea funnel]] - [[Jason Fried]] - [[Agile Manifesto]] - [[Scrum]] - [[Kanban Methodology]] - [[Parkinson's Law]] - [[Project Management (MoC)]]