Read on Twitter
Some good nuggets for implementing Shape Up with a small team in this Q&A between @rjs and @adamwathan
A thread of notes: https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1279097760520830976">https://twitter.com/adamwatha...
A thread of notes: https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1279097760520830976">https://twitter.com/adamwatha...
1. Smaller teams don’t have the resources to maintain a permanent shaping team/track and will need to intermix dedicated chunks of time between shaping and building.
2. It may not be practical to set a fixed schedule of repeating shaping/building blocks. Instead it’s important to develop your ability to diagnose which type of work a project needs and make good customized decisions or schedules on the fly.
3. Full cycles of multiple small batch projects can be a more common and important tool for small teams. This is a “box of chaos” abstraction that allows you to avoid micro-managing at a low level. “Planned overlap is very different than self-organized overlap within a box.”
4. A common use case could be the classic scenario where design needs to spend a week creating an artifact before dev can start building. Instead of scheduling a bunch of one or two week sprints with tight dependencies between each other...
4b. create a full cycle of several small batches that can interleave within the larger time box.
5. Some design work may also need to move back into the shaping process. If it’s possible for the design work to never fully crystallize treat it as shaping work.
6. Another approach may be to treat the output of one design bet as the input for a development bet. Basecamp tends to do this with their mobile projects, since almost all of their work originates with the web group.
7. To avoid the worry of ending a small batch cycle with a bunch of open tasks across the different pitches create an urgency to at least get scopes over the hill as soon as possible.
7b. Take a conservative stance and be disciplined about putting all of the possible work on the hill chart and starting it all at the downhill side.
8. You don’t have to wait till the very end to ship small batches. Prefer to finish and ship them as soon as you can, avoid leaving an inventory of mostly-done work till the end.
I may have misinterpreted some of the ideas a bit but there was a lot of good stuff in this chat for smaller teams. Answered a lot of questions and highlighted some of the struggles my group of ~5 people had. Thanks @rjs and @adamwathan !
