Shaping in Real Life

2-Week Remote Course, Workshop, and Q&A with Ryan

Shape Up "by the book" is what works for Basecamp. In the real world, one size doesn't fit all. If you have separate PM, designer, and engineer roles — not unicorns who do everything — there are questions you'll need answers to and rules you might need to break to make Shape Up work for you.

The most common challenge when adopting Shape Up is getting product and engineering to work hand-in-hand. If product shapes the work separately, without engineering, and tries to give a finished solution to engineers, problems appear. It's easy to misunderstand the examples in the book and think that some rough description of the outcome or some drawings of an interface are enough for a cycle to go well. In reality, there's a learning curve:

• What does well-shaped work look like?
• Who do you bring together to do it?
• When do they get together?
• How long should it take?

Signs that help is needed are when the product team thinks they have a good solution in hand, but then when they present it to engineers, it all goes wrong. "We can't do it that way." "It's more complicated than that." "Why didn't you involve us?" "We don't have time to do all of this."

Or you might know another version: there's not much pushback at the beginning of the project. But three weeks into it, the time bombs explode. Suddenly there's all kinds of complexity. The scope is way bigger than anyone thought.

Shaping in Real Life is a two-week, remote course for the key people on your product and engineering teams. The course, workshop, and Q&A enable them to speak a common language, see how different real-world teams have adapted Shape Up, and avoid common pitfalls. The workshop gives them an experience of running a live shaping session, surfacing time bombs, and making trade-offs together.

Format of the course

• We offer the course in public cohorts of about 20 people, 2-3 times a year.
• The course is two weeks long, requiring 30 mins per day, except for the workshop and Q&A
• 10 short, dense video lessons, released daily, give the foundation of language and concepts. The lessons include real examples from different real-world teams. Lessons are followed by "Make it Real" questions that connect what you learned to the situation your team is in.
• Live, remote shaping workshop with Ryan to learn the techniques for running productive shaping sessions.
• Ryan provides personalized answers via chat throughout the course.
• Group Q&A with Ryan at the end
• We announce the exact dates and agenda for each cohort ~2 months in advance.
• Tickets are $2,500 per person