The Shape Up Method: What Product Managers Need to Know
Product development is a pretty complicated process. It starts with understanding who your customers are, what are the pain points of the customers, coming up with solutions to resolve those pain points, and finally implementing those solutions. This might look very straightforward and it probably is but only when the teams are small. The moment teams start getting bigger some common problems start to appear. Some of them being:
- Teams feel that the projects go on and on without a realistic end date and no end in sight.
- Higher management feels the pressure of not getting projects out on time thereby having a considerable effect on the revenue of the company.
- Product managers feel that they are a part of the feature factory and not being able to concentrate on the vision and strategy of the product.
- The engineering team feels that they are not spending their time efficiently because of working on multiple projects at once.
Have you or your team also faced a similar problem? If yes, this article will help you to come up with a solution. And the solution is called “The Shape up Method”.
History of shape up method?
The team behind Basecamp, an online collaboration app that lets people manage their work together and communicate with one another, faced similar problems as mentioned above. Basecamp started off in 2003 as a tool that the internal development team built for themselves. At the time Basecamp was a consultancy firm specializing in designing websites for multiple clients. But as the team grew from single-digit employee strength to double-digit, and the changed vision of being an online collaboration app from a consultancy, the company started facing problems as listed in the above section. This is when the internal team at Basecamp came up with the concept of the Shape Up method that’s been used in multiple companies since over a decade now. The method aims to better define and plan projects before handing them off to development teams to build and ship.
What is the shape-up method?
Shape up method enables companies to achieve a customer-loving product on time, by addressing risks and unknowns at each stage of the product development process. The way this is done is by shaping, betting, and building products by the product development teams. Some key concepts that are a crucial part to understand this method are -
- Shaping — This phase is when the higher management discovers multiple projects, defines them clearly, and hands them over to the development team. Shaping a project requires a balance between providing enough concrete information for the development team to start the work and having a proper direction, but abstract enough for them to come up with creative solutions. Shaping projects, or pre-work, endeavours to strike a balance between being concrete enough to provide direction, and abstract enough to give teams room to build. This is an extremely important process since it helps to solve open questions even before releasing them to the project team. This way, by the time the project reaches the development team, it’s already concise and clear.
- Betting — This is the phase where the shaped projects are discussed in detail. The higher management along with the respective stakeholders prioritizes the projects and decides which ones should be approved for the budget and which one should be discarded. The ones that are discarded are stored in a database but no further work is done on them until the higher management decides to approve them.
- Building — This is the phase where the projects are then moved under the responsibility of the development team. This includes the product manager, designers, and the engineering team. The key point here to note is that the project’s timeline is 6 weeks. This is because the team at Bandcamp who came up with the project believed that six weeks is long enough to build something meaningful start-to-finish and short enough that everyone can feel the deadline looming from the start, so they use the time wisely. The majority of our new features are built and released in one six-week cycle.
Why use it?
Shape up method is said to decrease the risk early on by having the higher management and the relevant stakeholders understand the project right at the start. This also reduces the ambiguity regarding the project before it comes to the product development team. It also enables product teams to think about the right problems that can have a much larger impact earlier in the development process. This in turn allows them to focus on the right products and discard the low-impactful products. And lastly, the shape-up method gives direction to the teams thereby helping them to be on track considering the 6-week timeline.
How to use it?
As mentioned earlier, product development is a very complicated process, and depending on the magnitude of the problem, this process can be time-consuming as well. This is where the Shape Up method comes into the picture. If you are a product manager, designer, developer or someone who is actively involved in the product development process, the following steps will help you to implement the Shape Up method -
- Always start with the vision. Understand the bigger picture. This is extremely important not only for the higher management who plays a crucial part in the Shape Up method but also product development team who takes care of the development process. Clarity on the vision is half battle won. And once the clarity is achieved, communicate this clearly to all the relevant team members.
- The higher management goes through the list of projects that connects with the vision.
- The higher management prioritizes and selects the projects that are worth working on. These projects are assigned budgets as well.
- The projects are then passed to the development team who first understands the project and then builds it over the period of 6 weeks.
- At the end of 6 weeks, the higher management takes 2 weeks and shapes and bets projects for the next 6 weeks. Once that is done, the respect projects go into the “build” phase of 6 weeks.
The below diagram will help you to illustrate and understand the process -
Let’s have a case study here,
Precise Incorporation is a new startup in the e-commerce space. The company lets users buy used electronic and fashion products. The company didn’t have a return policy when it started. Because of this, the users weren’t able to return the products. Anybody who has been in eCommerce knows how advantageous a strong return policy can be. But also on the other side, building the entire return framework is extremely difficult. Hence the higher management was stuck in this dilemma of building the return policy and the infrastructure to support it.
So the higher management and the teams at Precise incorporation decided to use the shape-up method. In order to build a return, the framework requires a bare minimum of 3–4 months. So the teams at Precise did research and discovered that users are more interested in returning products that are more than 200 Euros price. This helped the team to bet on this project and come up with a PoC within 6 weeks. They built a return framework only for high-end products with prices of more than 200 Euros. And the next 6 weeks were used to polish the feature and push it live for all the products. This was possible because the team already had spent time building the PoC. This not only helped the company focus on making the customer happy but also increased customer loyalty.
Final Thoughts
In general, the Shape Up method could be very useful for aligning the teams to the vision of the company. Thereby decreasing the risk of letting the teams work on projects that might not be impactful at all.
Have you used the Shape Up method? How was your experience? Tell us in the comments.
