I’m Juan a startup founder from Argentina.
I’ve been following Shape up ideas and putting into practice continually for 2 years now.
I know it’s holiday season and I joined just recently, but I see the forum has been less active. It would be sad to let it die, because there are still so much we can learn and share together.
My question would be to all of you:
What are struggling lately?
What would you like to learn or put into practice for 2022?
What have you learned in 2021?
Here is my answers:
We are solving problems that we hear customers are struggling with but we are not able to allocate time for new things to experiment with.
I would like to train more shapers in the team (we are 10 in the development team and 43 in total in the org)
I’ve learned that some people like to write shape and write pitches, others just want to code, and some just like to do reactive work, identifying that intrinsic motivation is key when assigning roles.
My biggest struggle is that if you can’t adequately protect your delivery team’s time from outside emergencies/distraction, Shape Up breaks down.
For 2022, I’m interested in seeing whether Shape Up can gain traction vs. existing solutions. For example, I’m the only “team” currently in my org that uses Shape Up for delivery. Everyone else either uses Kanban and/or Agile.
I have no intention of switching back to a sprint-based framework, but I’m surprised that other PMs I know are either uninterested in learning Shape Up and/or see it as a threat to their existence. (This is anecdotal, but the better they are at “Agile” the less likely they’ll consider learning Shape Up. I think the “no backlogs” stance is a bridge many of them are unable to cross.)
My biggest learning in 2021 is seeing where Shape Up is great (and not so great) for managing marketing supply-side activities. Don’t know many others trying this out for marketing, so it’s definitely learning while trying.
I will make another post about this struggle, I think we can have a discussion about what other people is doing to protect the team from outside distractions .
I don’t know what people mean when they talk about “Agile” but if you think about Shape Up builds up on cycles as feedback loops. If having backlog is something that it’s important for your team, I would keep that practice as long as they know that a backlog is a repository for ideas and not a commitment that must be delivered.
I would really like to know why it’s not so great.
I posted recently about possibly creating a Discord. I’m actually in the early phases of re-booting one of my projects from last year: fractional.pm. I’m thinking about doing PM interviews from the Shape Up community and posting on Youtube. Interested?
I have no intention of switching back to a sprint-based framework, but I’m surprised that other PMs I know are either uninterested in learning Shape Up and/or see it as a threat to their existence. (This is anecdotal, but the better they are at “Agile” the less likely they’ll consider learning Shape Up. I think the “no backlogs” stance is a bridge many of them are unable to cross.)
I think Shape Up works for companies with a certain amount of resources.
If a company has the resources to employ Program Managers that work with an array of Product Managers to plan for short, mid, and long-term projects and Project Managers to operationalize the plan, they can effectively build things using the agile model. It’s difficult to do this in the startup environment.
I’ve seen a company lengthen its sprint cycle to be 4-weeks, so there are ways to become more Shape Up-y without fully adopting its principles.
I think there are elements to Shape Up that people who build using agile can adopt. Hill Chart, for example, is fantastic.
I think the “no backlogs” stance is a bridge many of them are unable to cross
I don’t understand this. In Shape Up, people have “private backlogs” in place of a single giant public one. The former is neater and leads to a better sense of ownership. What are they so opposed to it?
I think Shape Up works for companies with a certain amount of resources.
Interesting that you think that. I’ve always thought that Shape Up suits smaller outfits better. I see facets within Shape Up that are perfect for startups. For example, Shape Up teams are meant to be small, filled with people who wear multiple hats, where engineers and designers are expected to make product related trade offs. Big enterprise have the opposite set up: team members are numerous and they hold specialist roles (Scrum Master, PM, BA, Technical BA, and so on), which to me makes them incompatible with Shape Up.
The mai thing is that a public backlog accessible by Business People, leaders and the whole team feels like a commitment. You can have your own private ideas that you want to try but as long as you don’t share them you can always choose not to do them.
The idea of shape up also is to have optionality, to don’t commit upfront to some plan.
I agree that if you have Product Managers (who can have the autonomy to take business decisions), you can be more “Lean”. But the “shape up” way is to take some design decisions (and remove the uncertaintes) upfront so the building team can flow without having to request time from the Business people.
Fair enough. Although I disagree, I see why business people and stakeholders want a public backlog like this. IMO there are better ways to align people on product direction/commitment, such as using the north star framework.
Oh I see. I’m keen to hear from other their team size and how well Shape Up is working for them. We used a pared back variant of Shape Up with 7 engineers and we worked reasonably well. We would have been a lot more successful had we adopted Shape Up fully.
