Language, mindset, process
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
Products are easier to reason about when you think of them as functions. They transform an input situation into an output situation. This lets you describe what the product does as a transformation of the user's circumstance instead of a bundle of features. How a product is like
Product design can look like magic. When I started doing it ten years ago, the small team I worked on made decisions intuitively. There was no system and it worked fine. But as the company grew, I found myself unblocking teams and diagnosing problems. When I saw patterns repeating themselves
I’ve been asked to explain my approach to managing product development. This topic applies to individual designers and programmers as much as managers. The goal is not to take what we already do and do it faster or more efficiently. The goal is to have more information and flexibility
The biggest challenge for web designers is the unthinkably huge number of possible ways to solve any given problem. We usually don't think of this because we have our habits and traditions to fall back on, but there are literally billions of possible pixel combinations for each page