Ryan Singer, «Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters»

Quotes

We don’t count hours or question how individual days are spent. We don’t have daily meetings. We don’t rethink our roadmap every two weeks. Our focus is at a higher level. We say to ourselves: “If this project ships after six weeks, we’ll be really happy. We’ll feel our time was well spent.” Then we commit the six weeks and leave the team alone to get it done.

We shape the work before giving it to a team. A small senior group works in parallel to the cycle teams. [..] When shaping, we focus less on estimates and more on our appetite. Instead of asking how much time it will take to do some work, we ask: How much time do we want to spend?

You can’t really schedule shaping work because, by its very nature, unshaped work is risky and unknown. For that reason we have two separate tracks: one for shaping, one for building. During any six week cycle, the teams are building work that’s been previously shaped and the shapers are working on what the teams might potentially build in a future cycle.

This principle, called “fixed time, variable scope,” is key to successfully defining and shipping projects.

The best is relative to your constraints. Without a time limit, there’s always a better version.

Our default response to any idea that comes up should be: “Interesting. Maybe some day.”

When it comes to unclear ideas, the worst offenders are “redesigns” or “refactorings” that aren’t driven by a single problem or use case.

First, we need to have the right people—or nobody—in the room.

In terms of risk, well-shaped work looks like a thin-tailed probability distribution.

Beware the simple question: “Is this possible?” In software, everything is possible but nothing is free.

Try to keep the clay wet. Rather than writing up a document or creating a slideshow, invite them to a whiteboard and redraw the elements as you worked them out earlier, building up the concept from the beginning.

Without a specific problem, there’s no test of fitness to judge whether one solution is better than the other.

It’s easy to overvalue ideas. The truth is, ideas are cheap. They come up all the time and accumulate into big piles. Really important ideas will come back to you. When’s the last time you forgot a really great, inspiring idea?

The amount of work you get out of two weeks isn’t worth the collective hours around the table to “sprint plan” or the opportunity cost of breaking everyone’s momentum to re-group.

Six weeks is long enough to finish something meaningful and still short enough to see the end from the beginning.

The solution doesn’t matter if the problem isn’t worth solving.

The way to really figure out what needs to be done is to start doing real work.

to-do lists actually grow as the team makes progress

Effective teams sequence their problem solving in the same way. They choose the most important problems first with the most unknowns, get them to the top of the hill, and leave the things that are the most routine or least worrisome for last.

We should question any new work that comes up before we accept it as necessary.

A dedicated team called SIP (Security, Infrastructure, and Performance) handles technical work that’s lower in the stack and more structural. Our Ops team keeps the lights on.

It doesn’t matter what exactly happened down at the scale of hours or days along the way. It’s the outcome that matters.