Ideas, connecting the dots
The recent wave of layoffs reveals something tricky about the notion of "empowered" product teams. There's a missing ingredient that seems to separate the teams who get cut from the teams who survive.
On the latest Circuit Breaker podcast, Bob and Greg talked about causal structures. This is when you’re trying to improve a system and, in order to get the effect you want, you first try to understand the mechanism of how the system works. At 9:00 Bob gave an
This post on LinkedIn got me thinking: If organisations want to move away from B-grade app experiences, they need to recognise Dev and Design are two distinctly different skill sets. Both require an amount of time to master. Therefore pointing a Dev to design system won’t result in consumer
The latest Circuit Breaker podcast with Bob and Greg goes into incredible depth on "Prototyping to Learn". When Bob first told me about his approach to prototyping, I balked. The idea of building out multiple versions of something seemed wasteful, like going backwards or sideways instead of forwards. I didn't
A good question came up from a long-time Shape Up adopter: I’ve noticed you mention two slightly different methods for sequencing: - The interrelationships diagram - Getting to the most unknowns first Have you landed on a preference yet? Are there circumstances where one is better than the other?
I'm seeing a pattern among successful Shape Up teams. Companies first try Shape Up on a product team that builds features. They discover a new rhythm of shaping and shipping meaningful changes, and it feels like a victory. Then, they think "well since Shape Up is working ... we should try
Right now I'm at the very beginning of a project with lots of unknowns. Starting it exposed me to a common pitfall where scope expands very early in the first steps of a project. I want to prototype a drag and drop interface to do this kick-off exercise. My plan
I'm experimenting with ways to demonstrate the path from a raw idea to a well-shaped pitch. That is, how to go from "I think we should spend time on X" to "here's a specific concept for X that we're confident we can ship in six weeks." Sometimes I have a
When work is turned into tickets, our brains shut off. In ticket-land, the work is a given, and it's just a matter of "doing it." This is true for any traditional to-do software. The thing is, when smart people tackle work, they actually do work on the work to figure
I keep getting questions about the work that happens before shaping a project. How do we decide if a problem is worth shaping? When does a problem deserve further research to frame the problem better? To answer this, our natural instinct is to weigh problems against each other. We ask
I often get asked about how research fits into timeboxed work. If a team is working in a cycle and they can’t decide on a direction, should they do research? How do they fit that in a fixed timebox? This cuts to a fundamental question of where research belongs.
It’s natural to argue over what is the best, most perfect solution. Who would want to build anything less? This is especially true when we have our design or development hats on with a specific idea we hope to see in the final product. But it turns out that
Here’s a look at some shorthand I’ve been playing with, early in the shaping process. I use this when I have a bunch of stuff in my head for a design but I don’t know where to start. I don’t know if all the pieces are
There are many definitions of orthogonality. For the overlapping worlds of design, engineering and business, we can summarize with this question: what needs to be solved together as one whole, and what can be solved separately? Two things are orthogonal if we can work on one of them without having
After a few newsletters about defining work with pattern languages, a friend of mine said: "I don't get it. These pattern languages just look like outlines or specs. What's different?" Well, okay ... at one level it is just a spec. And maybe focusing too much on the pattern language format
Bob's been slowly schooling me in Taguchi methods over the last couple years. I'm starting to make some small steps towards applying them to software projects. My favorite so far is the signal/noise metric. Here's how I understand it so far. How do we know if a product is
I'm re-reading Battle by Christopher Alexander. It shows the exact steps he took to design and build the Eishin Campus in Japan. I feel like a student in a master class when I'm reading this. The phases he went through map very well to Shape Up concepts, but his methods
One day, back in April, I was shaping some work for Basecamp 4 (the next version of Basecamp that we're planning to build next year). At 4:00 p.m. I got an alert from Basecamp's Automated Check-in, asking: "What have you worked on?" Normally I write a few bullet-points
A while back, I learned this technique from Bob. Sometimes I'm working on a design problem, and there are too many things to solve. They all seem tangled together, and I don't know where to start. I'm afraid that if I start on the wrong thing, I'll paint myself in
Analytics apps don't tell you much about usage behavior. You might be able to see how many users performed an event, or how many times they did it. But none of the analytics packages out there are good at showing you how often people do things. Are they using to-dos
People mix the terms UI and UX together. UX is tricky because it doesn’t refer to any one thing. Interface design, visual styling, code performance, uptime, and feature set all contribute to the user’s “experience.” Books on UX further complicate matters by including research methods and development methodologies.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with details when you’re designing a UI. That’s why I try to keep hold of which things “really matter” and continually come back to them. In a software tool, the important things are the capabilities you give your users. People use your
What is at the core of an interface design? I think of the design not as a collection of screens or buttons or pixels, but as a collection of jobs that the user wants to do. In this article I want to give you a feeling for how to think