A better way to plan, build, and ship products

Ryan Singer, an early 37signals employee and creator of the book Shape Up, explains the Shape Up method of planning and shipping product using fixed time budgets (appetites) rather than deadlines. The conversation covers how shaping sessions bring product, design, and engineering together to de-risk ideas before committing time, and how teams can adopt the approach in companies unlike Basecamp.

01Key learnings

• Start from a fixed time budget (appetite) and shape a solution that fits it, rather than estimating a large idea and hoping it fits.
• Hold shaping sessions where product, design, and a senior engineer work together to sketch the idea and surface technical unknowns before any team is committed.
• Aim for a shaped idea describable in under about ten moving pieces; if it takes more, it likely isn't shaped well enough.
• Avoid handing teams detailed Figma files or long PRDs without engineering input, since these often break on contact with the codebase.
• Treat a six-week cycle as a maximum; smaller bets of two to four weeks work well for growth teams, and cycle length can vary by team.
• Do not extend deadlines when a project runs long; instead cut scope to protect the deadline, or if it's not viable, return the work to shaping rather than reinvesting blindly.
• Start with a pilot project of meaningful but bounded size to learn the approach before rolling it out to the whole organization.
• Use the nine-box exercise at kickoff: have builders split the shaped idea into roughly nine major implementation chunks to check scope and clarity.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.