For me, the hardest part of Shape Up isn't understanding the principles, it's knowing when a pitch is actually done. What's the right level of detail? How do you know if you've shaped enough?
This is a reference I made for myself. Five required sections from the book, quality checks for each one, and one extension I added (Open Questions as a shapedness metric).
Would love to hear how others have adapted Shape Up for their context.
True, but is that a strategy problem rather than an operational one? Have they lost the ability to ship, or are they misaligned on what people want? You need both.
I'm not sure I know the answer, but it's a very good point! Thanks
I started researching how Michelin-starred restaurants coordinate their teams - not because I care about fancy food, but because they solve exactly this: small specialized teams creating something complex together under pressure.
The parallels to software are exact. Front of house/back of house coordination. Pre-service meetings. The "pass" as a coordination point. Station ownership. The quiet kitchen principle.
Then I discovered Basecamp's Shape Up is essentially their version of the brigade de cuisine system. 6-week cycles, betting table, appetite setting, cool-down periods. It maps perfectly.
I wrote this to work through what small bootstrapped software companies can learn from how these organizations actually operate. Would love feedback from others dealing with this coordination problem.
Hmm, your ChatGPT subscription would come up as "OpenAI ChatGPT Subscription" in your bank account, or it does for me. That sounds more like OpenAI API use? Which would not include "ChatGPT" in the transaction.
If it doesn't sound right, maybe check you've not leaked any keys in public github repos etc? There's crawlers hunting for exposed API keys. Stay safe out there!
That's a very valid concern. What kind of maintenance though? Most of the examples in this article are very simple. Maintenance might involve iterating on features, no real live services that would require any work.
Security patches though, yeah, that's tougher. My position is that if security is a concern, you need to hire someone. As much as many of these tools can integrate with databases and set up auth, I'm not sure how much I trust it personally. Especially if the actual code is hidden.
Agreed! The similarities are stark. let's take the comparison further... Nvidia is the dotcom bubble's Cisco.
But the internet stuck around. It was still useful.
Just because something is overhyped, or doesn't meet the standards of the world's most demanding engineering organisations, doesn't mean that it's not here to stay and improve.
That's very true. But programmers are extremely expensive. I don't think these tools or vibe coding replace expensive programmers, but they do make it possible to noodle where once it would have taken a potentially very risky commitment for a small business / solopreneur.
You can do this with github pages too, including your own subdomain. ChatGPT could walk you through the steps but there is no requirement for an LLM.
There's been big efforts to simplify this stuff for years. Lots of good tooling out there (which the right questions to an LLM will yield for you).
I think LLMs help with stuff like deploying a website, but they aren't a requirement. You still need to know what you are doing if you want to do something complex.
I'm not sure it's explicitly gatekeeping, more a lack of perspective.
The benefit and excitement is most felt by people with little to no experience writing code themselves. The fear seems to come from building.. what, code for critical infrastructure? That's just not what we're talking about here.
This is a reference I made for myself. Five required sections from the book, quality checks for each one, and one extension I added (Open Questions as a shapedness metric).
Would love to hear how others have adapted Shape Up for their context.