Great feedback.
At Scolab we started the adoption of ShapeUp about 6 months ago and we are midway into our 3rd cycle.
Our main motivation was that despite having a good Scrum adoption after 40ish sprints on the “dev” side, the “product” side of the company was no able to get into the same mindset and it was causing major imbalance even up to the higher management, where we had a lot of “fog of war”. For me, the “betting table” was a very smart way to put back the spotlight on the need for timely and “involved” decisions on what to build.
One major change we made from the vanilla ShapeUp described in the book, was that we allowed everyone in the company (50ish employees) to shape pitches and did not restrict the time allowed or try to control what they would pitch. In return, people mobilized, put forward a lot of ideas and we found hidden talents.
On the “build” side, people didn’t “freak out” too much when we declared “scrum” to be “dead” and that we needed to move on quickly. We kept the original 3 teams but gave them more autonomy and focussed on the proper tranfer of “power and responsabilities” when validating pitches.
To do a quick turn-around in just a few months with involed a few consultants for training and change management, and the overall transition had only the typical adoption outliers which got resolved along the way.
Deployments of news features in production has been maintained and overall trust and satisfaction seem pretty high. After 25 years in software development, I can say this is the most interesting (and human) flow I’ve seen up to now.
We’re still doing a lot of improvement and adaptations from the original concept, and we’re planning on doing a more formal evaluation after our 5th cycle.
Cheers!