Key concepts
The Shape Up method presented in this book is tightly interwoven. It may take some thought and experimentation to pull out the right pieces and adapt them to your team.
Whether your team can adopt the method at once or not, I hope that the language and concepts in this book gave you some things to take home immediately:
- 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
Get in touch
We’d love to hear what you think so we can make the Shape Up method easier to adopt. What did we miss? What still isn’t clear? What do you wish we had talked about that we didn’t? We’d also love to hear about your successes and challenges as you try to apply it to your teams and projects.
Send us an email at shapeup@basecamp.com.