Ryan Singer

Shaping in a Nutshell

This video is the best place to start. You'll get the key ideas of Shape Up in under 20 minutes.

The Book

A next step might be to read the book: Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles & Ship Work That Matters.

If your company is structured like Basecamp (bootstrapped, designers who code, etc) you will be able to apply much of what's in the book.

If that's not the case, think of it as toolbox, not a process. Then pick the practices that can help you collaborate in critical moments of your existing process to ship better.

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New from Shaping in Real Life

Shape Up has evolved a lot since 2019. Ryan defined new concepts and language in response to the wide variety of teams who wanted help. The best place to learn these is the Shaping in Real Life course. You can get to know some of these new concepts by checking out the updates below.

Framing

Over the last few months I've worked with teams to help them adapt Shape Up to their specific context. Talking to a wider variety of teams has been eye-opening. It's helped me discover many hidden factors that were present at Basecamp when I first wrote the

Systemizing kick-off

Recently I tried a new exercise to systemize the way we kick off projects. Kick-off is that moment when the person who shaped the work hands it off to the development team. It's an important moment in Shape Up because the dev team takes full responsibility for interpreting
© 2025 Ryan Singer