We have moved away from Scrum and consider using Shape up methodology

Shape up is the methodology, which Basecamp is using in their company for shipping work.

The methodology is documented in a book by Ryan Singer, who is Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp. Book is available for free here: https://basecamp.com/shapeup

A bit of background on why we considered changing the process and why we are excited that #ShapeUp is the one that will bring positive results.

1️⃣ We’ve got a startup product which has been launched for about 3 years, has some success but not WOW one. We are still trying to find our niche in the market and define the value proposition of the product.

How Shape up can help:
For this year, we want to experiment a lot and we don’t want to invest in things until those are proved to be working with our real users. In Shape up, during the Shaping process, the budget limit is being defined (the Business appetite), which will make it clear for Business what this or that idea will cost and also will help the implementation team to make decisions within those limitations.

2️⃣ Team is distributed, having Product owner, Business team in US and teach team in Armenia. So sometimes business background of items which tech team is working on, is being lost.

How Shape up can help:
We have defined Shaper team, where will be representative from Tech team as well. Tech and Business team will work closely together in the shaping process on possible solutions.
Also, the Pitch concept, template by itself will make to share the whole background of the idea/feature we want to implement, since the same Pitch doc goes to Deciders to make the decision and also comes to Tech team who will take the whole ownership of providing a version of the solution.
The other thing which will help team to be product oriented and also engaged in ideas generation, will be an accessable place (most probably slack channel) where everyone can share and lobby their ideas.

3️⃣ We have one general team who are dealing with all directions of the product (monetization, new features, core data flows, DevOps issues, etc).

How Shape up can help:
We have defined Product team, who will be extremely flexible and we will create small teams for every cycle and for every Pitch we would implement. We also defined teams for other directions of the product, which will have their own, most probably Kanban process.

4️⃣ We do quarterly plannings of priorities, which in reality are being changed quite often.

How Shape up can help:
Decider team will decide what we build next for every cycle (in our case we want to start with 4 weeks cycles and 1 week of cool down period). So by this, we won’t have those quarter planning sessions and also stress that we need to change the plans.

5️⃣ We have huge Backlog of items, which requires quite a time to maintain those and we never get time to reach those.

How Shape up can help:
Same as for the point above, the concept that we don’t keep Backlog and we decide every cycle what to build next.

6️⃣ We are occasionally having issues that stakeholders are coming with requests, which do not fit the priorities we work on.

How Shape up can help:
I like idea of having decentralized Backlog, which means that other teams or stakeholders should lobby their requests and prove why that one will add more value for the product in the specific moment. The whole Shape up process feels to be based on highly collaborating approach, so I hope that will keep us all on the same page making clear what we build now, why we do that and what we expect to receive back.