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Shape Up Overview ​

META ​

This is an IxDF outline of the "Shape Up" book that aims to:

  1. highlight IxDF specific parts how do we use Shape Up
  2. be a short guide to refresh knowledge for all main Shape Up process participants: stakeholders, developers, and designers. Reading the whole book (or selected chapters) is still highly recommended.
  3. provide instructions on how to better use limited resources during the shaping process: designers and developers

Intent ​

The Shape Up Framework originally created by Basecamp and aims to better define and prioritize projects before handing off to teams to build and ship.

In the case of IxDF, Shape Up adopted by the dev team to solve one important issue: prioritisation. In a company configuration without a Project manager, the dev team receives a lot of requests from other teams and needs to choose few from plenty requests that they are going to work on next sprint. But the dev team often does not have a competence and wide enough product overview to make such decisions and in a choice between urgent and important tasks tends to choose an understandable one.

Apart from prioritisation, Shape Up also helps to set budges/scopes for ideas/tasks by using "appetite" instead of estimates.

Phases ​

  1. Shaping: define the problem, solution, risks and issues and the rabbit holes
  2. Betting: chose the most valuable ideas to put to development
  3. Building: develop solutions, test and ship
  4. Cool-down: planning, finishing pitches, technical work, fixing

Time frame ​

While the idea goes from Shaping to Betting then to Building, it transforms and collects more details: ShapeUp Phases

Note, Shaping phase starts with a new building cycle, they are two parallel tracks: ShapeUp Phases

You can read more about it from Shaping document.

Building squad and bug-fixes ​

While the majority of developers are in the Building squad busy on developing something new, there is at least one developer on the Support Engineer role, who handles all bug reports and other requests from different teams.

Materials ​

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