Ryan Singer

This post on LinkedIn got me thinking: If organisations want to move away from B-grade app experiences, they need to recognise Dev and Design are two distinctly different skill sets. Both require an amount of time to master.  Therefore pointing a Dev to design system won’t resul...

The latest Circuit Breaker podcast with Bob and Greg goes into incredible depth on "Prototyping to Learn". When Bob first told me about his approach to prototyping, I balked. The idea of building out multiple versions of something seemed wasteful, like going backwards or sideways...

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 book. This is now leadi...

A reader asked on Twitter: Any recommendations on how to combine Shape Up and usability testing? When is the good timing for it? Should it be included in the cycle? Who should take responsibility for it? To answer this, I first divide usability problems into two kinds: Perceptua...

A good question came up from a long-time Shape Up adopter:  I’ve noticed you mention two slightly different methods for sequencing: The interrelationships diagramGetting to the most unknowns first  Have you landed on a preference yet? Are there circumstances where one is better...

I'm interrupting the normal newsletter format to let you know about a workshop I'm giving. It's called The Confident Handoff. I'm giving it remotely to a small group of early adopters on November 22-23. Handoff is that point in time where the pitch goes to the build team to start...

I'm seeing a pattern among successful Shape Up teams. Companies first try Shape Up on a product team that builds features. They discover a new rhythm of shaping and shipping meaningful changes, and it feels like a victory. Then, they think "well since Shape Up is working ... we...

Right now I'm at the very beginning of a project with lots of unknowns. Starting it exposed me to a common pitfall where scope expands very early in the first steps of a project. I want to prototype a drag and drop interface to do this kick-off exercise. My plan of attack looks l...

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 the p...

I'm experimenting with ways to demonstrate the path from a raw idea to a well-shaped pitch. That is, how to go from "I think we should spend time on X" to "here's a specific concept for X that we're confident we can ship in six weeks." Sometimes I have a clear concept in my head...

When work is turned into tickets, our brains shut off. In ticket-land, the work is a given, and it's just a matter of "doing it." This is true for any traditional to-do software. The thing is, when smart people tackle work, they actually do work on the work to figure out what the...

I keep getting questions about the work that happens before shaping a project. How do we decide if a problem is worth shaping? When does a problem deserve further research to frame the problem better? To answer this, our natural instinct is to weigh problems against each other. W...