Shape Up: A Practical Introduction

If you read the previous article and found yourself nodding along to the diagnosis, the natural next question is: so what do we do instead? Shape Up is the most coherent answer I have found. Not because it is perfect, and not because it solves every problem that sprint methodology creates, but because it starts from more honest assumptions about how complex software work actually happens. It was developed at Basecamp over many years of building their own products, written up by Ryan Singer, and released publicly in 2019. It has since been adopted by teams well beyond Basecamp, in contexts ranging from small startups to larger product organisations. This article is a practical introduction to how it works. Not a summary of the book - read the book, it is worth your time - but an explanation of the core ideas, why they matter, and what they look like in practice for an engineering team making the shift. The central problem Shape Up is trying to solve is different from the problem sprints