This video is the best place to start. You'll get the key ideas of Shape Up in under 20 minutes.
A next step might be to read the book: Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles & Ship Work That Matters.
If your company is structured like Basecamp (bootstrapped, designers who code, etc) you will be able to apply most of what's in the book.
If that's not the case, think of it as a mindset shifter. Then pick a couple specific practices that you can adapt to the context of your team.
Shape Up has evolved a lot since 2019. Ryan defined new concepts and language in response to the wide variety of teams who wanted help. The best place to learn these is the Shaping in Real Life course. You can get to know some of these new concepts by checking out the updates below.
A founder came to me with questions about his team's results adopting Shape Up. Some projects were knockouts. They got exactly what they wanted done, when they wanted it done. But other projects dragged on, stuck at the last yard line. What was going on?
Shaping isn't writing. It's not filling out a template or creating a document. It's getting to that "a-ha" moment together where the parts crystalize and we have something that will work. (Plus an example of how messy a real shaping session looks.)
Questions about roadmaps, betting at the last minute, iterations, and how shipping what we intended is like driving a car.
Over the last few months I've worked with teams to help them adapt Shape Up to their specific context. Talking to a wider variety of teams has been eye-opening. It's helped me discover many hidden factors that were present at Basecamp when I first wrote the
Recently I tried a new exercise to systemize the way we kick off projects. Kick-off is that moment when the person who shaped the work hands it off to the development team. It's an important moment in Shape Up because the dev team takes full responsibility for interpreting