- Appetite
- The amount of time we want to spend on a project, as opposed to an estimate.
- Baseline
- What customers are doing without the thing we’re currently building.
- Bet
- The decision to commit a team to a project for one cycle with no interruptions and an expectation to finish.
- Betting table
- A meeting during cool-down when stakeholders decide which pitches to bet on in the next cycle.
- Big batch
- One project that occupies a team for a whole cycle and ships at the end.
- Breadboard
- A UI concept that defines affordances and their connections without visual styling.
- Circuit breaker
- A risk management technique: Cancel projects that don’t ship in one cycle by default instead of extending them by default.
- Cleanup mode
- The last phase of building a new product, where we don’t shape or bet on any particular projects but instead allocate unstructured time to fix whatever is needed before launch.
- Cool-down
- A two-week break between cycles to do ad-hoc tasks, fix bugs, and hold a betting table.
- Cycle
- A six week period of time where teams work uninterruptedly on shaped projects.
- De-risk
- Improve the odds of shipping within one cycle by shaping and removing rabbit holes.
- Discovered tasks
- Tasks the team discovers they need to do after they start getting involved in the real work.
- Downhill
- The phase of a task, scope or project where all unknowns are solved and only execution is left.
- Fat marker sketch
- A sketch of a UI concept at very low fidelity drawn with a thick line.
- Hill chart
- A diagram showing the status of work on a spectrum from unknown to known to done.
- Iceberg
- A scope of work where the back-end work is much more complex than the UI or vice versa.
- Imagined tasks
- Work the teams decide they need to do after just thinking about the project. See discovered tasks.
- Layer cake
- A scope of work you can estimate by looking at the surface area of the UI.
- Level of abstraction
- The amount of detail we leave in or out when describing a problem or solution.
- Must-haves
- Tasks that must be completed for a scope to be considered done.
- Nice-to-haves
- Task left for the end of the cycle. If there isn’t time to do them, they get cut. Marked with a '~' at the beginning.
- Pitch
- A document that presents a shaped project idea for consideration at the betting table.
- Production mode
- A phase of building a new product where the core architecture is settled and we apply the standard Shape Up process.
- Rabbit hole
- Part of a project that is too unknown, complex, or open-ended to bet on.
- R&D mode
- A phase of building a new product where a senior team spikes the core features to define the core architecture.
- Raw ideas
- Requests or feature ideas that are expressed in words and haven’t been shaped.
- Scopes
- Parts of a project that can be built, integrated, and finished independently of the rest of the project.
- Scope hammering
- Forcefully questioning a design, implementation, or use case to cut scope and finish inside the fixed time box.
- Shape
- Make an abstract project idea more concrete by defining key elements of the solution before betting on it.
- Six weeks
- The length of our cycles. Six weeks is long enough to finish something meaningful and short enough to feel the deadline from the beginning.
- Small batch
- A set of 1-2 week projects that a single team ships by the end of a six week cycle.
- Time horizon
- The longest period of time where we can feel a deadline pushing on us from the beginning. Six weeks.
- Uphill
- The phase of a task, scope or project where there are still unkowns or unsolved problems. See downhill.
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