Reading Ryan Singer’s Shape Up a few years ago was formative (or re-formative, or something) in my thinking on how product development can and should work. After that it was a rabbit hole on jobs-to-be-done, Bob Moesta’s Demand-Side Sales, demand thinking, and more.
Since he wrote the book in 2019, he talks about 2 new concepts that extend Shape Up a little further: the role of the “technical shaper”...
This is a cool little background post from Ryan Singer explaining the origins and his process behind Shape Up, a web book about product development.
One of the things he did when getting started (with no solid idea of how to approach it) was commit to giving a workshop on how Basecamp worked. This created a deadlined forcing function to compel him to come up with the initial content and framework:
I didn’t know how to write a book. But I did know how to give a workshop. So I put a call out on Twitter....