Summary of first project done with Shape Up, at startup working in kinda SCRUM/kinda kanban so far

Hello there :wave:

At Tjekvik we’ve been playing with ShapeUp for last couple months. We tried few projects already and the results are super satisfying. We’re about 10 people startup, and growing now so we’re experimenting a lot with the workflow.

I wrote about how we approached our first (kinda) ShapeUp project, how we dedicated resources to try it in quite a small dev team, and how we glued to our current workflow with evolution not revolution approach.

It also happens to be my first blog post so I’ll be grateful for any feedback, and I hope you’ll take a thing or two you can use at your team :slight_smile:

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Nice writeup - I’ve wanted to a similar post on my experience moving to ShapeUp at a midsize B2B, so thanks for the inspiration!

I think you deftly articulated a challenge that we’re still working on a year in: snapping the habit of working on horizontal layers in favor of shipping vertical scopes that increment value. Great examples and best of luck on your continued “ShapeSCRUMbanster” journey! :+1:

If you do get around to writing yours as well, please do share! So much to learn given everyone’s specific business contexts!!

Can you elaborate on why you said “no” to shaping and betting? We originally said no to betting as well but discovered it to be a critical component. Shaping was always critical for us as that was how we would turn over work to the teams in the form of pitches.

Hi @justin. Yes, so we basically wanted to start playing with this as soon as we could. We got rid of betting because we knew what project is gonna be a test one. We knew we have to do it, so you can say it was already a bet. Our problem was how to make sure we deliver something and don’t get caught in longer than expected.

We’re still experimenting with ShapeUp parts and slowly including more and more shaping work. For betting we still have some promises we made when we were smaller company to get clients and some stuff that needs to be done with a specific due dates so we have some external influence that we have to keep in mind when deciding on what to do next.

I’m however personally looking for opportunity to do some betting rounds in near future, so we’ll see how it goes :slight_smile:

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That’s great! Have to start somehow