Is Shape Up just a nice theory?
Or does it work in real life?
Here at Curious Lab we “eat our own dog food”, in that we adopted the Shape Up “methodology” while building our product Shape Up Board for Jira.
We gave ourselves a strict time box to complete the app. As it turned out, the team loved having a hard deadline. It freed us from the paradox of choice. The tight deadline rendered many choices impractical, thereby narrowing down the options every time we needed to make a decision.
The deadline (and prior market research) also prevented negative self doubt from distracting us. “Will this work? What if no one wants this?” The time box acted as an investment cap, and it gave us a sense of peace while building the app.
We also used the app to build itself. As soon as the app became somewhat usable, we started using it to guide our work. In keeping with the Shape Up principle of tackling unknowns as early as possible, we spent the early days poking at Jira’s REST API and learning SVG for the hill chart (both new to us, hence risky). Boy was this a good strategy! The REST API threw some very unexpected curve balls. Glad we focused on it early.
This plain-looking list of epics was how the app’s home page looked for most of the life of the project. We were happy to leave styling to the end because we knew that we’d be able to quickly knock out a half decent UI.
We really enjoyed organising our work like a hill. Yes, the first half of the project felt slow and sluggish. But running downhill in the second half felt really good. We felt in control and confident about meeting our deadline. We finished off so many things so quickly, because we had laid out a solid foundational structure in the uphill phase. In the end, we managed to ship our app on time, even when we had unexpected interruptions.
So, does Shape Up work in real life? For us the answer is yes, definitely. Other organisations have an overall positive experience as well. Our friends at Up Bank are practising Shape Up very successfully. Teams at Block are trialling it too. UserVoice has publicly documented their successful shift to Shape Up.
What about you? Do you have any plans to try Shape Up? Do you come across anything interesting? Please leave a comment below. We’d love to hear your experience.
