The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Shipping work that matters (Interview)

Jun 25, 2020

Ryan Singer, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp and author of Shape Up, revisits his methodology's impact on product development. He discusses how teams effectively ship meaningful work and the role of longitudinal thinking in design. The conversation shifts to the importance of collaboration among product, design, and development teams, addressing the challenges and successes of implementing Shape Up. Ryan also explores evolving user personas, the significance of understanding user experience, and the necessity of empathy in design.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Fortune 50 Company Experience

A Fortune 50 company adopted Shape Up, resulting in increased collaboration and morale.
The emotional energy and excitement surrounding improved teamwork were surprising.

INSIGHT

Shape Up as a Mirror

Shape Up's effectiveness varies, highlighting team strengths and weaknesses.
It reveals issues in leadership alignment, programmer performance, and overall org structure.

ADVICE

Successful Project Handoff

Clearly define the scope and boundaries of a project before handing it off to a team.
This ensures successful execution and empowers teams to make detailed decisions.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Shape Up

Ryan Singer

Shape Up is a book by Ryan Singer that provides a practical framework for managing software development projects. It emphasizes the importance of shaping work to fit within fixed time constraints, rather than fixing the scope and letting the time vary. The book introduces a three-stage process: shaping, building, and batting, which helps teams focus on delivering valuable work efficiently. Shape Up promotes a more collaborative and autonomous approach, empowering teams to make decisions and solve problems independently. The book's principles have been adopted by numerous teams and organizations seeking to improve their product development processes.

The End of Average

Todd Rose

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

In this book, Daniel Kahneman takes readers on a tour of the mind, explaining how the two systems of thought shape our judgments and decisions. System 1 is fast, automatic, and emotional, while System 2 is slower, effortful, and logical. Kahneman discusses the impact of cognitive biases, the difficulties of predicting future happiness, and the effects of overconfidence on corporate strategies. He offers practical insights into how to guard against mental glitches and how to benefit from slow thinking in both personal and business life. The book also explores the distinction between the 'experiencing self' and the 'remembering self' and their roles in our perception of happiness.

The Pragmatic Programmer

From Journeyman to Master

Andy Hunt

David Thomas

Dave Thomas

Andrew Hunt

The Pragmatic Programmer is a book that centers on how to use software to solve problems effectively and how to grow as a developer pragmatically. It was first published in 1999 and a 20th Anniversary Edition was released in 2019. The book emphasizes key qualities such as being an early adopter, having fast adaptation, inquisitiveness, critical thinking, realism, and being a jack-of-all-trades. It uses analogies and short stories to present development methodologies and caveats, including concepts like DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It), and rubber duck debugging. The book covers topics such as writing clean code, estimating software delivery, instituting change, combating stagnancy, and making software processes resilient and efficient through automation and testing.

We’re revisiting Shape Up and product development thoughts with Ryan Singer, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp. Last August we talked with Ryan when he first launched his book Shape Up and now we’re back to see how Shape Up is shaping up — “How are teams using the wisdom in this book to actually ship work that matters? How does Shape Up work in new versus existing products?” We also talk about the concept of longitudinal thinking and the way it’s impacting Ryan’s designs, plus a grab bag of topics in the last segment.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019 OR changelog2020. To learn more and get started head to linode.com/changelog.
Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

Ryan Singer – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

The Changelog #357: Shaping, betting, and building
Ryan’s new hobby podcast called Synthetic A Priori
Shape Up (book site)
“Good design requires thinking longitudinally.”
New versus existing products
Taguchi methods on Wikipedia
Salt. Fat. Acid. Heat. - If you can master these four elements, you can master the kitchen.
EconTalk podcast
The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness
Dr Ole Peters
Time for a Change: Introducing irreversible time in economics by Dr Ole Peters

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!