The “Shape Up” framework

`0:33:56`

That whatever we choose to do can take no longer than six weeks. So this is not an estimate of time, it's an appetite, which is a radically different approach. It doesn't sound like that much of a different word, but it really is. An estimate is like how long do we think it's going to take? And however long it takes is however long it takes. And most human beings are terrible estimators. We all are pretty much terrible estimators. So that's why things keep going and going and going and going. We instead have appetites. And our appetite for any individual feature is no more than six weeks. Essentially that's our budget we're willing to spend. I'm only willing to spend six weeks in any feature. So we have to figure out the simplest, most effective version of that to get that done within six weeks and get it done by two people. Now, not everything gets the full six weeks.

`0:34:42`

Some things were like, we have a one week appetite for this. This is not that big of a deal. If we have it, great. If we don't have it, that's fine. We're willing to spend a week on it. Not that it could take a week, because it could also take 12 weeks if we give it 12 and it could take 24, if we give it 24. Work expands to fill the time available. So for us it's about appetite. So the idea of appetites, maxing things out at six weeks, two people max, and then there's a lot of other details, and I could go on for an hour about Shape Up, people can read about it. But it's those fundamental principles, appetites, six week max, small teams and this idea of shaping the work ahead of time, then giving the team a lot of latitude to figure out how to get that thing done. We don't have a spec, we don't create to-dos or tasks or tickets for people.

`0:35:32`

They create the work that needs to get done to fulfill the idea that we've written up and designed essentially, and they figure out how to do it. Then we trade. So they might get into something that we've said, we have about six weeks. Well, we're only give it six weeks and two weeks in they go, we actually stumbled into something we didn't realize. This is probably not going to be able to be done the way we thought. So can we do it this way? And then we have a discussion and there's a conversation. There's a lot of molding and changing that happens along that period of time. We call it trading concessions. There's all the trade-offs we're always thinking about. So all these things that come to bear. And then people often ask, well, what if you don't get it done in the six weeks you gave it? Well, so it depends. So in most cases it should die, meaning it just doesn't happen.

`0:36:19`

Because if we say we're going to give it six weeks and we give it seven or eight or nine or 10, then we're not really giving it six weeks, we're giving it 10, then we don't really have a system. There are times though, when there's a couple days left when we're on what we're calling the downslope. So we have these things in Basecamp called hill charts. And things that are on, that's actually work... A project's more like a hill. It's not like a linear line. If you're on the left side of the hill, it means you're still pushing this thing up the hill. You're still trying to figure out how to do this. But once work gets to the top, it's downhill from there. It's just pure execution and we know how to nail it. So if we're almost at the bottom of the hill on something and it needs two more days, fine. If there's any work that's left over that's still on the left side of the hill, meaning we're still pushing it up, we don't know how we're going to do it and we're at our time limit, it almost certainly dies.

`0:37:04`

So there are some contextual decisions to make at that point, but fundamentally that's how we approach work. And this prevents long running projects that never end, which by the way are the most demoralizing kinds of projects. Things that you're stuck on that you don't want to do that never end, sucks. And if people get stuck on a couple of those, they want to leave their job. So the implications here are significant. And so we want to keep people out of that zone of like, I hate this work and it goes on forever. Because sometimes you're going to hate the work. Not all projects are that exciting. Sometimes it's maintenance stuff, sometimes it's updating an internal billing system that's boring and no customers are going to see but needs to be done. But you'll know that, hey, at maximum we've got four weeks on this. I can already see the end from the beginning, no big deal.

`0:37:51`

But if it's like this is going to take nine months and you're on week four and you're like, I hate this, bad. So we want to stay away from that sort of thing. You have these quotes along these lines about planning, long-term business planning is a fantasy. I don't plan long-term because I want to do what I think, not what I thought. Yes. I love these. This whole idea of appetites, it's very appealing. It makes so much sense. It's like the ultimate impact to effort calculation. The effort we'll put into this is fixed and we'll not go beyond this because the impact we expect from this is pretty clear. And if the effort goes up and up and up, well why did we even do this? But obviously the downside is you can't promise things really to sales marketing, which I think makes sense in your type of business.