Shaping every day

In Shape Up, a common mistake is to shape only when doing cooldown. “Cooldown is too short; I don’t have time to shape!" is a common complaint when introducing Shape Up into a product organisation.

However, the problem is not the length of the cool-down (even though I often cut it down to one week to be able to find two cycles in a quarter) but the fact that shape does not happen every day.

As a product manager, designer or tech lead in a team running Shape Up, it’s your core job to be shaping; you are not the project manager, and you should not be running stupid time-sucking agile "ceremonies". You should be shaping and working on the quality of the final products your team is shipping! Shape Up is no different than "continuous discovery", "dual track agile", or what else you want to call your discovery processes.

It takes a lot of time to shape well, and it's time well invested. Shaping is the foundation for making the right decisions at the betting table, so it's the foundational investment you can make to improve your business. If you do shitty shaping, your returns on the investments in your product will produce compounded interests on shit.

You are just spinning wheels if you are not shaping and shipping as a product manager.

Go and shape, and don't ship shit.