With Shape Up, the process of “shaping” new product takes investment to really understand and communicate an idea. But in the process, this precedes the “pitch”, the step where the team reviews a shaped concept and buys into working on it:

According to the book, shapers prepare pitches, pitches go to the betting table, and then the business decides at the last moment which pitches to “bet on.” Teams who follow this to the letter encounter a problem: how do you justify spending the time to shape something when you don’t know if the business will...

In this essay, Kevin Kwok attempts to differentiate between productivity and collaboration, with a focus on how Slack has failed as yet to become the nervous system that combines these things.

This take is one of the better summaries of where Slack sits in the stack of business productivity tools:

A new generation of functional apps have risen, with messaging and collaboration built directly into them as first parties. And with them it becomes increasingly clear that Slack isn’t air traffic control for every app, it’s 911 for when they fail.

There are many examples...

Ryan Singer and the Basecamp team just released their new ebook on product development, called Shape Up, made available for free online. Me and some of our team here have already dug into it and are finding some interesting ideas to experiment with in our own product development cycles.

On shaping and wireframing:

When design leaders go straight to wireframes or high-fidelity mockups, they define too much detail too early. This leaves designers no room for creativity.

Appetites:

Whether we’re champing at the bit or reluctant to dive in,...

Like many working in product, I’ve been a follower-slash-admirer of how Basecamp works for years.

This model of working in 6-week “cycles” sounds like an attractive option for organizing a team, without falling into the onion-slicing trap of what agile can become — where more time is spent microscoring, tracking, and measuring velocities than on defining what needs to get done and why.

Once a six week cycle is over, we take one or two weeks off of scheduled projects so everyone can roam independently, fix stuff up, pick up some pet projects we’ve wanted to do, and generally...

Basecamp’s Ryan Singer articulates well the struggles with adopting and truly getting value out of an agile workflow. The core problem most teams face isn’t that they’re bad at estimating time to completion, it’s that they don’t even know what exactly they’re trying to complete. Knowing the broad outline of the objective — like “refactor user management interface” or “build dashboarding system” — is one thing, and the team could all largely agree on the target. But it’s another thing entirely to break down each step along the way into a discrete element with...