An introduction to the Shape Up Method

Simply carrying on with the old way of doing things can keep your business from reaching its full potential. What you need is an innovative alternative to traditional product development methodologies that provides a more comprehensive approach to organizing every step of the development process. That’s where the “Shape Up Method” comes into play.

Here is an overview of how the Shape Up Method works, where this innovative alternative to traditional methodologies came from, and how shifting to Shape Up can help your team create the best possible products for your target audience and business.

The Shape Up Method is a product development methodology that prioritizes focus and clearly defined product visions. This method eliminates much of the risk that is frequently associated with older methodologies that don’t provide as much clear direction or take too long to shape the product vision.

The Shape Up Method is a cutting-edge alternative to project management platform Basecamp’s original approach to internal product development. It builds upon Basecamp’s early approach to developing just the right products by creating a better balance between long-term strategic planning and the smaller details that make up a typical workday.

The concept was introduced to the public in Ryan Singer’s book Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters. Singer is Basecamp’s head of product.

Basecamp identified several common problems with their initial product management and workflows. These included a lack of clear direction that made it difficult to effectively turn a vision into a final product and determine whether it was a good fit for the company and its target audience. This lack of clear guidelines led to frequent late shipments and missed internal deadlines, a limited ability to choose and fine-tune just the right products, and lower-than-ideal customer satisfaction.

Here are some of the most significant benefits associated with choosing the Shape Up Method over an older alternative:

Clear direction

Fine-tuning the details that make your product the best that it can be is ultimately the job of your development team. However, these teams need to have a reasonable amount of information available when getting started to ensure they are on the same page as your leaders.

Providing too few details can lead your development team to create something that strays too far from what your business wanted to create. Even if they end up providing a quality product, it’s unlikely to align with what your target audience wants from your company—especially when you compare it to what they could have created with plenty of clear direction.

The Shape Up Method allows plenty of space for both creating a strong starting point and experimenting with ways to make that initial vision even better.

Timely delivery

Building up customer interest before a new product idea is ready to be purchased can help you feel confident that your business will be able to bring in a reasonable profit. However, developers who obtain pre-orders before their product is complete can fall short of their buyers’ expectations if they can’t finalize details within a reasonable amount of time.

Starting a product development cycle with too little preparation can leave your team with too little direction to build and improve the product within a short enough time frame to keep buyers interested. Choosing the Shape Up Method can help you avoid both late shipping and missed internal deadlines that prolong the process.

Reducing risk

Creating products that are a good fit for your customers and bring in a reasonable amount of profit for your business requires a more targeted approach than simply relying on trial and error.

Every new idea involves some amount of risk because your customer base may not respond how you expect them to. Your team has several options for weighing each idea’s risk before moving forward in the development process.

The Shape Up Method provides an abundance of data for your team to use when weighing potential new products and considering which options are most likely to be successful. Your team can identify early concerns that may indicate that a particular product idea won’t be a good fit for your business or target audience. You can then lower overall risk by eliminating ideas with limited potential while choosing the most promising options to move forward with.

Here are some of the most important things to know about the Shape Up Method and how they support one another:

Shaping: Defining the work

Understanding exactly what your end goals for a particular project look like before getting started is an important step in making strategic decisions that keep each stage of your design process moving in the right direction.

You need a clear definition of how you want your product to work, the purpose you want it to serve, and the demographic groups that make up your ideal target audience. Otherwise, your team is more likely to make development decisions that sound good in general but don’t necessarily support your project’s specific goals. While you don’t want to focus too heavily on planning every detail at this stage, ensure you have made enough decisions to guide your development team effectively.

The Shape Up Methodology enables you to fine-tune some of the most important details before your development cycle kicks off. This means your leadership team can make most of the important decisions about your project before handing it over to your larger development team.

This approach will enable your development team to begin the project with the best possible balance between having plenty of direction (ensuring the finished product matches your vision) and enough flexibility. Flexibility is key if you want your development team to use their discretion in certain areas that are better suited to their specialized expertise.

Betting: Prioritizing projects

Projects that show early signs of having the highest potential to produce the results your team wants should generally receive most of your developers’ attention.

Projects that appear to be producing the best outcomes early on don’t always translate to the best possible user experience for your customers or the strongest profit for your business. However, betting on these projects tends to produce better results than using a more arbitrary method of deciding which projects to move forward with.

Betting also helps keep your team focused on the specific concepts that are most important to your company. With a limited amount of time, money, and other resources, you can’t treat every possible positive or negative factor that influences your early outcomes equally. Prioritizing the specific areas that best support your business’s goals and values is a much more realistic way to ensure that every product your development team produces is a strong idea and a good fit for what makes your business unique.

Betting takes everything into consideration. However, it focuses most heavily on concepts that increase your likelihood of choosing projects that support your specific business.

Building: Execution phase

Once you have selected the most promising projects by analyzing their potential and studying how well they perform during your initial six-week development cycle, your team can make adjustments to make each product even better. While early decisions can help your team find an ideal starting point, generally, this initial prototype shouldn’t be the version of your product that customers eventually purchase.

During the building phase, your development team can use data that was compiled over the previous six weeks to identify areas in which your product is not performing as well as you would like it to. They can then make changes through an experimentation process to create something that will meet your customers’ needs and expectations even more effectively.

Much of the building phase involves experimenting with small fixes for issues and shortcomings. By this point, your team should generally have a solid product base that doesn’t need major changes. However, there are always small details that can be handled better. For this reason, this stage uses a mapping process to help developers identify, improve, and track changes to your products.

Designing and adhering to consistent work cycles makes it easier for you to decide whether a project’s results indicate that it’s worth moving forward with.

Not every project will produce the results your team is hoping for during the first six weeks. Even so, keeping your cycles the same length can provide a better framework for comparing the progress of projects and enabling you to determine how quickly each idea is reaching certain benchmarks.

Using the same time frame to make these comparisons can give your team a better idea of which projects have the most potential.

Implementing and adhering to a specific and firm deadline for gathering the early information you need to make further decisions is also helpful. It can ensure that each team member spends their time wisely.

You don’t want to start a project without setting a specific end date or be too willing to change that end date without a solid reason. Doing so can make your team members feel they have more time than your leaders reasonably want to spend to reach a specific stage in your development process. This can significantly reduce productivity and slow progress.

Contributing as much as possible to a specific goal over a relatively short time frame also helps improve the accuracy of your results and makes for more reliable comparisons.

Agile focuses on short work sprints that are typically divided into two-week cycles. Each of these sprints breaks down a larger project and focuses on completing one or more specific components of work at a time.

On a six-week Shape Up Method cycle, teams aim to complete a full project.

The Shape Up Method and scrum can both be beneficial for the right business. Considering your goals for the product development process can help you determine which option is likely to be the best fit for your company at any given time.

Scrum cycles are generally much shorter than Shape Up cycles. This can make completing a project within an ideal time frame more challenging. Shape Up also provides more feedback throughout the development process, while scrum incorporates product backlogs and provides more scaling options for growing companies.

Shaping and refinement are not the same thing—although they have similar end goals.

Shaping comes earlier in the product development process because it involves creating the best possible starting point for your development team. Refining involves experimenting with information that was obtained earlier in the cycle to make the final version of the product the best it can be before it goes to market.