Shape Up
Shape Up is Basecamp's product-development methodology, published as a free book by Ryan Singer in 2019. The cycle has three phases: shaping (a senior PM or designer scopes a 6-week project with hard boundaries — what's in, what's explicitly out, sketches of the solution); betting (the team's small group commits to projects for the next 6-week cycle in a betting table); building (the chosen teams execute autonomously with hill charts replacing burndown).
Shape Up's strongest commitments are its hardest sells: fixed time, variable scope (the 6 weeks is non-negotiable; the team cuts scope to fit); no backlog (stale work doesn't get re-bet); explicit cool-down between cycles (2 weeks of unstructured work). It's not a replacement for Scrum at most companies — it's a different model that works well in product organisations with stable teams and clear product authority. Companies that have adopted Shape Up beyond Basecamp report success in specific cultures (autonomous senior teams, product-led decision-making) and failure in others (large consensus-driven orgs, regulated industries). Worth studying even where you don't adopt it.
Related terms
- OKRs
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal-setting framework, originated at Intel under Andy Grove and popularised at Google by John Doerr, that pairs qualitative Objectives (where you want to go) with measurable Key Results (how you'll know you got there).
- Dual-track agile
Dual-track agile (sometimes called dual-track discovery and delivery) is a product-development model, codified by Marty Cagan and Jeff Patton, that runs two parallel workstreams: a discovery track that validates which problems are worth solving and what solutions will work, and a delivery track that builds the validated solutions.