#386 Shaping Up
Friday Ship #386 | March 2nd, 2024
This week we began transitioning how we build our product from Scrum-ish to Shape Up.
While we’re the makers of the leading platform used to facilitate Agile ceremonies, we’ve never been particularly orthodox about any one style of working. The most important thing is that our way of working reinforces our values of Transparency, Empathy, and Experimentation. Recently, there have been significant updates to our strategy, structure, and team (more on these in a future Friday Ship); I’ve reassumed the role of Product Manager and was feeling some tensions with our two-week sprint cadence and wanted to try something new.
Years ago, I read Shape Up by Ryan Singer and the folks at 37 Signals/Basecamp. While I don’t agree with all of the recommendations (such as not keeping a backlog), there are quite a few principles that help an organization focus on delivering changes that matter to its users. Some of the elements I like:
- Working in six-week cycles, followed by a two-week cooldown period: There’s less overhead and a focus on delivering meaningful increments of value, plus “unmanaged” time for addressing tech debt, personal annoyances, innovation, or smaller user frictions.
- Decoupling Design from Implementation: Designs must be shaped into units that can be completed within a six-week cycle but aren’t beholden to be completed within any one six-week cycle. This affords us the time to create designs beyond what we might build initially, validate them as inexpensively as we can (i.e., while they’re still pixels and not code), and then test our riskiest assumption by building it in a six-week cycle (see: cupcakes, cakes, and wedding cakes).
- Betting Instead of Planning: Every 8 weeks, I’ll make an explicit decision on what product briefs (a design + a quick write-up) we’ll carry forward in the next six-week cycle. This replaces our prior practice of cascading OKRs down to our product squads and having them perform independent planning on how to structure their backlog. It was my experience as CEO that this practice tended to produce a large variety of unrelated, low-risk small changes rather than bringing our full weight to bear delivering updates that could impact the lives of our users most.
Next week will be week 1 of the first six-week cycle. I’m eager to report back in a few weeks and share how it’s gone.
Related Friday Ships
Metrics
There was a slight dip in MAU this week, while the number of meetings ran leapt nearly 10%. Over the coming weeks, we’re shipping a few changes that should have downstream impacts on user activity. While it might be a month or two to see the impacts, we’re eager to see if we can make a significant impact on this important metric.
This week we…
…hosted a product workshop to begin designing some advanced features for an organization’s leaders.
…moved ever-closer to getting a new Impact Level 2 instance in ready for production users within the U.S. Department of Defense. More on this, too, in a future Friday Ship!
Next week we’ll
…kick off our first six-week Shape Up cycle.
Jordan Husney
Jordan leads Parabol’s business development strategy and engineering practice. He was previously a Director at Undercurrent, where he advised C-Suite teams of Fortune 100 organizations on the future of work. Jordan has an engineering background, holding several patents in distributed systems and wireless technology. Jordan lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.