Podcast Awesome

Why We Use "Shape Up" for Project Management

Season 1 Episode 20

In this podcast Matt and Travis discuss Shape Up, a project management philosophy created by 37 Signals, the makers of Basecamp, and how it helps Font Awesome stay on track. Instead of trying to build everything at once, Font Awesome ships complete features. By using the Shape Up method, Font Awesome has been able to deliver products efficiently and effectively, which reduces the risk of delivering an unsatisfactory product.

The traditional waterfall process, by contrast, can take a very long time to build a product that is often out of date by the time it is completed. During his career, Travis has worked with a variety of project management methodologies, including Agile, Scrum, and Kanban. In the end, the Font Awesome team has found that Shape Up works best, allowing them to ship consistently and at a pace that aligns with their philosophy of business and life.

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HIGHLIGHTS: 

"One of the surprising things and sort of a takeaway I took from reading Shape Up is that it's okay — It might even be expected that certain work gets abandoned and that shipping really is the highest priority and that backlogs kill productivity. And that kind of goes along with the philosophy, too, of work, that you have to have constraints and limits to actually allow creativity to flow. And you can't do everything. So you do have to have constraints. You do have to be able to say no. "

"Dave and I take a lot of inspiration from the books that 37Signals put out like Rework and It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work. Those kinds of things. And trying to maybe do business differently, do our own spin on it, see what works for us based on all the places we've worked. And kind of how we would try to change things. And one of those things that I ran into — and I'll speak for me — ran into my career is you might get a solution to find we need this feature X and the software and we're going to give you three weeks to develop it."


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TIMESTAMPS: 


0:00:09 Shape Up Method and How Font Awesome Uses It


0:02:41 Discussion on Traditional Waterfall and Agile Methodologies


0:04:22 Agile and Kanban Methodologies for Software Development


0:07:51 Product Development Lifecycle Using Shape Up Methodology


0:09:15 Exploring the Benefits of Six-Week Splits and Two-Week Cooldowns for Software Delivery


0:11:18 How Two Week Cooldowns Allow For Side-projects like “Space Awesome”. 


0:12:39 An Overview of the Shape Up Workflow Process


0:15:39 Shape Up and Font Awesome's Business Philosophy


0:19:16 The Benefits of a 40-Hour Work Week and Embracing the Whole Person


0:20:51 The Benefits of Allowing Creativity and Autonomy in the Workplace


0:22:39 Exploring the Benefits of Font-Building Engine "Haunt Forge"


0:23:56 The Icon Wizard and Building with Creative Constraints


0:27:35 Iterative Development and the 37 Signals BaseCamp Methodology


0:29:41 Summary of Discussion on Software Development Methodologies and Project Management Methodologies

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Notes

Stay up to date on all the Font Awesomeness!

01:00 *Matt: * Can you tell me a little bit about what Shape Up is and how Font Awesome started using it

01:10 *Matt: * and maybe why it seemed like a good fit for our workflows?

01:13 *Travis: * Yeah, so Shape Up is kind of a software delivery or project management philosophy that's different

01:21 *Travis: * from say your traditional waterfall development or maybe even your typical agile development

01:26 *Travis: * and its many forms and came out of how Basecamp tried to ship software over its life

01:36 *Travis: * and then just within a couple years they kind of codified it in the book and kind of set out

01:41 *Travis: * kind of really what they've discovered over how they try to ship software

01:46 *Travis: * kind of matching their business philosophy of being able to ship software calmly

01:50 *Travis: * shipping a feature that is complete but maybe not have everything that you might want to have

01:55 *Travis: * just so you have that constant flow of delivering features or tools or whatever to customers

02:02 *Travis: * and you're not stuck developing a piece of software in isolation without customers seeing it

02:10 *Travis: * or working with it or giving kind of feedback and you're off developing for a year

02:14 *Travis: * and by the time you actually deliver it to the public it's completely not intended or wanted

02:20 *Matt: * or something's changed, the context has changed, the world has changed and it's just not usable

02:25 *Matt: * Right, and a lot of times that seems to happen say like in the waterfall method, right?

02:30 *Matt: * Like somebody says we want this product, you've got six months or whatever to create it

02:36 *Travis: * and then you run into this problem where it's like well that's not really what we needed

02:41 *Travis: * Yeah, and your traditional waterfall it's kind of very spec oriented

02:44 *Travis: * when I interacted with waterfalls very much like you'd have a lot of business folks

02:49 *Travis: * business development folks, they would be thinking through like what kind of the problems they have

02:55 *Travis: * and how we're going to solve, you know use software to solve those problems

02:58 *Travis: * and so then they would start writing a spec of how this thing needs to be able to work

03:01 *Travis: * and depending on where you are or what business you're working with

03:05 *Travis: * waterfall could flow out a bunch of different ways but sometimes it could be even very detailed specs

03:10 *Travis: * of workflows and use case diagrams and wire framing and all this kind of stuff

03:15 *Travis: * exactly what they want and then they would hand that off and the team would go build that

03:19 *Travis: * but you know depending on how complex the software is it could take a long time

03:23 *Travis: * and then by that time business has changed, the world has changed

03:26 *Travis: * and you would deliver something that was asked for but it wasn't quite what was needed by the time

03:32 *Travis: * you know they needed to use it and so then agile methodologies came into being

03:37 *Travis: * and how to respond better to changing business requirements

03:42 *Travis: * you know that's always something that needs to happen as you are in business and you're doing things

03:48 *Travis: * and customer requests come in or you have a better understanding of what they're actually asking for

03:52 *Travis: * you need to be able to shift what you're delivering but you want to be able to do that

03:56 *Travis: * to where you don't just completely burn out your team that you know you come in every week

03:59 *Travis: * and like okay well now we're building this and okay now we're building that and okay

04:02 *Travis: * you know nobody wants to work in that way either right because you start building momentum

04:05 *Travis: * you start having an understanding that building software is very complex and so

04:09 *Travis: * you want to try to minimize as much as that the jumping around as possible so that you deliver software

04:13 *Travis: * so agile came along and to try to help deliver software quicker respond quicker to changing

04:19 *Travis: * you know landscape and then from there taking those you know and i don't know for fact i'm not you know

04:27 *Travis: * necessarily speaking for the 37 signals folks but you know taking those principles and developing a methodology

04:34 *Travis: * that fit more with how they wanted to also run their company

04:38 *Matt: * because in an agile model usually that's like you know often like a two-week sprint right

04:46 *Matt: * which seems like a pretty short period of time to get something done and completed

04:50 *Travis: * yeah it kind of depends on what you know it can be defined a lot of different ways right so there's you know

04:57 *Travis: * agile is kind of not only of a development philosophy that also kind of transition into i guess more of a development philosophy

05:03 *Travis: * maybe XP programming or agile they get kind of jumbled together anymore but it's kind of there's a development philosophy

05:12 *Travis: * and some rules around that that don't really have anything to do with necessary project management

05:16 *Travis: * and then there's like the agile project management philosophy and one of the biggest ones is scrum

05:20 *Travis: * is what a lot of people know and yeah they they do more things like having sprints and you can define your sprint length

05:26 *Travis: * sure you can try to find that for your team what i've interacted with agile were mainly two-week sprints

05:32 *Travis: * and so then every two weeks and so you're delivering smaller bits of functionality but it also allows you to respond quickly quicker to customer requests

05:40 *Travis: * and in my case i work for contracting the O.D. contractor and so we were responding to what that particular branch of the military might want quicker in software

05:50 *Travis: * and so we would constantly do sprinting and kind of what we found when we founded Font Awesome is we didn't want to sprint the whole time

05:59 *Travis: * you know it's very much analogous to running if you're sprinting all the time there's really no time to reflect or rest or recuperate

06:09 *Travis: * you know you're just constantly going from delivery to delivery to delivery to delivery and there's no time to sit back and say okay as a whole where are we going

06:17 *Travis: * now in a lot of full scrum situations you would have the person on your team that interacting with the customer the business was to have that macro level

06:25 *Travis: * help the team deliver that macro level through a bunch of micro level sprints is the philosophy but actually i've worked in i've worked the waterfall way

06:34 *Travis: * i've worked the scrum agile way and when we did Font Awesome we wanted to try to take the best of what we've learned from and maybe kind of tweak into our own

06:45 *Travis: * so we kind of actually did kind of a hybrid we started doing kind of a Kanban style

06:51 *Travis: * how's Kanban different than like agile?

06:55 *Travis: * they're very similar you can almost put them in the same bucket it really comes down a lot of times for me it comes down to tooling and how you think about a project where Kanban maybe you would maybe back up a little bit maybe have a little bit longer quote sprints

07:09 *Travis: * and then the tooling is more like board focused one of the big ones that was very popular was Trello at the time right free and open source and got picked up by Atlassian

07:18 *Travis: * you know you would have your swim lanes would tell you like okay well this you know whatever you define them as but say for us it'd be like you know research and development or you know just thinking about an idea and then moving into okay let's define this a little bit further and then okay it's on the backlog ready to go

07:34 *Travis: * and then we pick it up and we put it and so it's an active development and maybe it's in testing and then finally it's done and you could quickly pull up the board the Kanban board and see where you know either a whole project depending on how you know granular define that

07:46 *Travis: * where it sits along its development lifecycle so we kind of we would do something like I can't even remember what we used to call it the philosophies we started before we knew anything about shape up was we wanted to do almost a sprint of product development and then a sprint of taking care of ourselves taking care of the software paying down technical debt or if we learn something that we can go back and refactor you know maybe after you know we delivered like oh we kind of wanted that to be a little bit better so let's go back and so it's kind of like the

08:16 *Travis: * this on off cycle as far as shipping direct software to the customer and then coming back and saying okay well what did we learn how can we make that better is there something we want to clean up to make our lives better going forward called it tick tock and so we would tick and then we talk and so we'd go on and off and it actually wanted to be in more analogous to what you do in shape up which is like the cool down period usually like a couple weeks after yes so with with with shape up you define a period of time 37 signals uses six weeks we also use six weeks again that's

08:46 *Travis: * really is and they talk about this it's really more about where your team sits what's your team composition what's your you know your business environment what you know all that kind of goes into what you think is a is a long enough time to get something significant done but not too long to where things can atrophy or you're delivering the wrong stuff and not too short where you feel like you're not getting something complete right or hold that you know instead of just delivering little pieces that eventually you know a lot of times if you do like two weeks sprints what we found what I found in working two weeks sprints

09:16 *Travis: * is we are delivering little pieces of the whole and then we're hoping that they all fit together at the end to fill the hole versus doing something so we do six week much like base camp recommends in their shape up book is we do six weeks we call them splits we want to actually change the mentality around what that is we're not sprinting we do six weeks splits and then we do a two week cool down that allows us to deliver software but also grow ourselves yeah so we use down a lot for learning something new doing bug fixes you know things that bother us doing

09:46 *Travis: * refactorings that like you know after we delivered something we're like I don't really like code isn't as maintainable as it could be or that user interface isn't as usable as it could be and so it's been buggy me and so we're gonna go in and we could use that we could do little projects that's like you know it's not it doesn't really fit into a full split but it'd be like a really cool little feature and so someone's gonna go pick that up and work and it's really more the team gets to pick what they want to try to do during the cool down then after cool down we kind of have a little show and tell is like hey we

10:16 *Travis: * learned what you build what you do you know what bugs you fix whatever you know we get to celebrate cool downs as much as we celebrate the work we do in a split yeah and I imagine too that's a really good time for folks to have some agency to work on the stuff that they want to so they feel energized and they get to work on stuff you know hopefully we're all working on stuff that we like and care about but you know if you if you have like a pet project or something like that that that energizes you and you like to jump in there

10:46 *Travis: * and figure stuff out that that would help folks to be in a good mindset and be excited to have hop back into the net project you know yeah we've gotten a lot of really interesting tools that wind up running our business out of cooldowns you know our web font rendering tool came out of out of cooldown we use an elixir phoenix stack with VJS right now is kind of what main fun awesome comms built in and so those stacks especially elixir is kind of more of a newer language so a lot of times when we have new developers whatever it's gonna take them a while to kind of get used to

11:16 *Travis: * our stack and and you know it's a little bit different it's it's a different kind of language has different ergonomics and mechanics and whatnot so learning that as well as VJS if you've never written straight up SPH style JavaScript it can take a bit and so one of our programmers here Ed he uses cooldown to build a game we've had blogs about that space awesome it's great fun yep and he and it was more of a challenge of hey like you want to learn VJS and he want to learn how to how to build with it better and he loves game Dev and always talks

11:46 *Travis: * about game Dev and so it's like hey why don't you kill two birds with one stone you can really dive in building the whole game a whole front end game in VJS will teach you a lot of VJS plus it's a really cool game and it uses all of our icons and then just a win win all around and it was just it's a really cool cool project oh yeah for sure it's been really cool to see him get that ready and launch it there was a lot of excitement among the team and did a little campaign online and got other folks introduced to it so for anybody listening who does not play

12:16 *Travis: * space awesome you're gonna want to go to space awesome dot io I think is the URL right yep go and play it there's all kinds of fun little Easter eggs and it's built completely all the visual stuff is created with fun awesome icons so make sure to check that out and all the

12:31 *Travis: * Easter eggs as well it's kind of like organ trail in space and there's a ton of Easter eggs that you can find and chuckle at yep indeed

12:41 *Travis: * okay so shape up it consists of three main workflows can you tell us a little bit about how that's give us a little outline for that yeah so it kind of breaks down into there's a shaping there's bedding and there's building and shaping is the process of taking however the requests come in either from customers our own thoughts anything like that where you take an idea of what's going on and what's going on and so that's kind of the whole idea of it and it's really cool to see that

13:11 *Travis: * idea and you start to shape it you start to pull it apart put it together figure out exactly what the solution is that you're trying to or the feature you're trying to to give and so you'll wire framing in there there's bread born it's granular enough that the team can take it and kind of know where to go with it and build it and what's needed the center of the idea but it's course enough that there's no it's not prescriptive yeah it's what we're not tied to this UI we're not tied to this way of building it there's enough creativity that the team can go in and bring

13:41 *Travis: * their genius to and make it full and whole and ready to deliver to customers but delivers on what is requested you get you get a chance to really think through an idea and you get to what's really neat about it is you get to put a bed on it right it's like the really neat thing I think about shape of is they try to change the way you think of things it's like not it's not how long I want to do something or how long this something takes what you say is this is how much I want to bet on it if I

14:11 *Travis: * got in box you know I want to spend four bucks on this feature and I want to spend six bucks on this feature right and so a lot of time that's weeks and so like we have six weeks we say okay what's the scope of this what are we willing to bet we want to bet like three weeks worth of time because you know maybe it's we want to get it out in customers hands and see if it resonates and see if we should spend more time digging in and developing that further or maybe we missed the mark maybe it doesn't resonate it's not as interesting as we thought it would be so

14:41 *Travis: * we'll get to learn that quicker and so we try to define like for this feature for this tool whatever that is how much we want to bet on that you know how much are we willing to spend per se and then that gets put into the shape of document so it's like okay shaping documents like okay this is everything that we think this is the problem that we're seeing this is the possible solution this is kind of like very high level workflow we type like this is how we could we could see the solution coming you know how you could work through the solution and this is what could look like and this is kind of what

15:11 *Travis: * the things that needs to do and these are the areas it possibly needs to touch and this is how much time we think we're willing to spend on that then we bring it what's called the betting table once we come through and say okay of all the ideas we have for this next iteration this next split what do we want to bet on what are we saying like yep this is a this is in a good enough shape we've spent the time shaping this you know enough that we're ready for the teams to work on it you know and then we get to hand that off to the team and so it's you know shaping and there's betting and then there's

15:41 *Travis: * building and when you hand that off to the team one of the things I love about shape up is you hand this document off you talk about it make sure we define for sure what the center what we're trying to deliver is and then you let the team do the thing that the team does and that's bring all their expertise their creativity their genius and to deliver software you know finally in our case final software to the customer and they get the chance to scope right so if we say listen you know at the shaping we thought this thing you know we're willing to bet six weeks and this is the really

16:11 *Travis: * the center of what we're trying to deliver and there's this you know maybe there's this this other piece that we say oh you know this would be nice little to go along with it this feature and the team's like okay well we can definitely deliver what's required the center of this thing in six weeks for sure right we feel that's a good bet but this thing over here man it's going to be really tough to fit that in and so they get the chance to scope hammer that out they say you know what that's not the center of this thing so it can go by the wayside to make sure we deliver you a full featured thing that you're requesting you know

16:41 *Travis: * and then important to come along and build that feature later right it can go back into the shaping process and be added to a future split and so it allows the team to have the autonomy to make sure things are scoped properly that they fit into the way we want to run our business which is we want to work calmly we want to deliver great software we want to be fulfilled in life and work as employees of fun awesome and also deliver and delight customers and the software we deliver and it's it's full featured and it works and it's easy it's usable it's understandable and we want to do

17:11 *Travis: * that without like running ourselves ragged okay so that that sounds like it sort of puts us right into the territory of the philosophy of how font awesome wants to work and you said before that it's crucial to you and Dave to align font awesome's business philosophy with how you guys work and so how

17:40 *Travis: * does shape up a line with that philosophy Dave and I take a lot of inspiration from the books that 37 signals put out rework and it doesn't have to be crazy at work and remote or remote company those kind of things and trying to maybe do business different do our own spin on it you know see what works for us based off of all the places we've worked and kind of how we would try to change things and one of those things that I ran into and I'll speak for me ran into my career is you might get a solution to find

18:10 *Travis: * you know we need this feature feature X and the software and we're going to give you three weeks to develop it and we don't and the person that's saying this may not have enough technical expertise to know like it's not possible to deliver what you're asking for in three weeks and so it's like okay the pressure where does that come from how to how do you do your job deliver this thing in three weeks and still meet the requirements that are laid out and it's it's a tough position to be in and so you know it's like

18:40 *Travis: * tons of extra hours or you make shortcuts in the code and the code that you're actually delivering is really not maintainable nobody else can come along and work on this thing or you know you really didn't test it out very well you know you're just you're just trying to get delivered and so what we wanted to do is have a workplace that you can deliver you know high quality great work in a reasonable amount of time in a standard amount of time and that it's on us to make sure that the things are shaped full enough that you understand that you're

19:10 *Travis: * what is being asked for and can be delivered in what we're trying to bet you know how much we're willing to bet and then you get the team gets the ability to say well we're going to cut these pieces out that aren't part of the center to make sure that we deliver it without having to sacrifice you know our own personal time so you know we believe a good 40 hour work week is plenty to get really amazing work done and we believe that what a person is outside of work is just as important when a person at work is and that they bring all you know I want the whole person when all their

19:40 *Travis: * creativity all their experiences that kind of stuff because I personally believe that builds the best software knowing that makes it a wonderful place to work to keep stress really low you know and make sure you get good sleep I mean all these kind of things kind of playing together that you come and who you are as a whole person you know we've got musicians on the team we have artists on the team a lot of us you'll get through the podcast from our nerd show and tell you're going to see like all these different things people love outside of and it does actually come in and help inform how they build software for people they become more empathetic they understand you know our customers better and they try

20:10 *Travis: * to you know deliver great software and we get to do that together and we get to go home and you know live our our home life and we just feel that that we get the best output by allowing people to work at a very calm workplace that I mean we're not perfect obviously but we strive for that we strive to be calm and deliver great stuff and just kind of keep moving the ball down the field every split one of the things we often do in a split when we do some check ins is we like okay who's running hot right

20:40 *Travis: * who's running hot which is you know for us it's code for like okay who's really feeling the burn above normal just everyday developing software what can we do to lessen that I just remember in my career working split to split to split burnout happened really quickly because again we're always sorry not in that case split it was for sprint sprint to sprint to sprint I'm always there's never time to be like can I relook at things can I just have a little bit of a breather to like bring up to you know business owners or something because that's what we want with our team too so there's enough time for

21:10 *Travis: * them to have input into what we're delivering at fun awesome the folks have some say so that just seems so much healthier to me yeah and I will admit like we're really lucky the kind of software we deliver we deliver software for designers and developers we value creativity because our product has to be creative you know because we get to value that we get to hire for that and we get to then build out the whole process and so just having that creativity flow and have ideas flow not only from top down but bottom up I think builds a calm working place and just a great

21:40 *Travis: * working place because I hope that everybody can be heard right everybody can be and have a chance to just especially with cooldown you know you get the autonomy you get to go build and you know so many things have come out of cooldown that are on our side are part of our products that it's if I said like that was just in like you know anybody's time that's on their own time you know and some of it's pretty major stuff that we use now that it's like you know that one even a split project that was just someone wanting to be creative and try things

22:10 *Travis: * and it's kind of like that's amazing to me you know that a lot of really important work just came out of cooldown and wasn't even you know even thought of of what we were trying to deliver it just kind of happened and then we built on top of it and sure then split work came out of that was like oh let's build on top of this thing this is great let's just keep moving.

22:26 *Travis: * So we talked a little bit about space awesome can you give examples of other cooldown work that was like really super valuable?

22:48 *Travis: * I mean one of them is we call haunt forge which is our font building engine so you know with font awesome we still deliver in SVG we still deliver in icon fonts and web fonts and we were using font forge for a long time but we would just ran into some technical issues with it and it has a whole UI that we just never use we were kind of really more for scripting for putting our stuff together in the icon font container itself out of that just kind of the desire of like could we actually have our own engine?

23:18 *Travis: * So that we could control add more features understand a little bit better Mike one of the programmers here it was one of those things where we just kind of talking about it really cool if we did this and oh man it really cool if like we could figure out if rest is like a really cool language to use and that kind of stuff he took that and just ran with it and then I can't even express how much it's grown and how valuable it is to us to this day that we and how we're going to use it that's a really great example trying to think of some others.

23:43 *Travis: * So I have to pinpoint haunt forge you said something about being headless is there a little bit of a pun there haunt forge?

23:53 *Travis: * We'd have to ask Mike I don't know maybe he hasn't thought about it actually that was pretty funny on our site kind of came out of one of our snuggles but you know snuggles are also kind of like cool down in a sense kind of got fleshed out more and cool down as the icon wizard.

24:08 *Travis: * Right.

24:10 *Travis: * You know modify icons and now now the icon library grows infinitely basically because you can just create your own and we want to continue to expand that.

24:18 *Travis: * So a lot of that kind of stuff happens and we wind up using it.

24:21 *Travis: * So let's define a little bit for folks what the icon wizard is.

24:25 *Travis: * So the icon wizard if you go to our you know like our icon listener search and you find an icon that you want and you want to have maybe a lightning bolt maybe we have a poo storm icon but maybe if we didn't you wanted your own poo storm icon you can find our poo icon and if you fire up the icon wizard you can annotate it with you know see if there's lightning bolt there and so there's a lot of those type of almost like little annotational icons you can use as annotations to other icons.

24:52 *Travis: * Modifying elements kind of.

24:54 *Travis: * Yeah modifying yeah so instead of like building all those icons ourselves you know what if we could build a way in which customers users can just define that for themselves you know whatever they're needing.

25:03 *Travis: * So if you have like a document you can put you know some kind of annotation to it but then it just opens up to like well what if you could take those defined annotations modifiers and put them on any icon and you get some crazy you know crazy combinations that you just couldn't even think of and so it's really fun.

25:22 *Travis: * One of the surprising things and sort of a takeaway I took from reading shape up is that it's that it's okay it might even be expected that certain work gets abandoned.

25:42 *Travis: * That and that shipping really is the highest priority and that backlogs kill productivity and that kind of goes along with the philosophy too of work that you have to have constraints and limits to actually allow creativity to flow and you can't do everything so you do have to have constraints you do have to be able to say no can talk a little bit about that.

26:05 *Travis: * Yeah we want to deliver high quality software and we want to deliver it to customers we want to ship you know shipping is important so one of the ways you know at least I find myself I must speak for everybody for myself if I'm given unlimited time with my creativity I will use unlimited amount of time.

26:20 *Travis: * I will always find something to mess around with or change or not be happy with this one thing and so putting a you know again a split in our case six weeks a time a time frame on it you know kind of helps box in that creativity like can't how you know and to me I think it helps us express more creative solutions right.

26:38 *Travis: * How can I deliver the center of this thing in this amount of time right the time that we've bet and so I think it actually fosters even more creativity around you know because a lot of times to me creativities are about the choices we make right can't do everything can't deliver everything or there's limitations on what we have so how can we creatively combine all those things to deliver software to the user that they're going to love they're going to want to use and so in that there are times when you get it wrong you just what you're willing to bet is not enough.

27:08 *Travis: * Because shaping is at a high enough level as you get into it you might find that oh that doesn't work that way or you know I can't use that tool yet it's not ready yet and so you have to readdress and so instead of just like say beating your head against a wall and trying to you know and try to force something that's not there you know we hit cool down if something did not ship that we can look at it and go okay well we get evaluated why didn't it you know is it worth continuing do we learn enough to like oh you know what we're going to readdress that and we're going to put it in the next split or maybe the split

27:38 *Travis: * after you know just because we have schedules you know but we think it's valuable enough we want to readdress it and we've learned enough that we know how to then maybe shape it a little bit further to to make it better make it to be accomplished and there's other things we go you know what we spent a lot we bet a lot of time on that or whatever time we bet but we bet the time on it and we go hmm it's not what we want it's not the ultimate end was like once we have it we're like yeah it's it's really not there let's put it back let's put it back let's let it ruminate let's think about it

28:08 *Travis: * let's see if it comes up again and that's okay right because all you know a lot of it's about learning right just learning what works what doesn't learn more about technology learn more about software development learn more about how teams work together learn more about what's important to customers you know all that kind of stuff and so we value that just as much as you know actually delivering the end product

28:38 *Travis: * so it sounds like you guys have kind of developed a philosophy and so correct me if I'm wrong but it does sound like you made some tweaks to how you do these projects and you kind of bumped into the 37 signals base camp methodology you're like yeah I think that's what we were shooting for and then or or was it that you were working on a project?

29:06 *Travis: * Was it that you were working within a methodology that you know wasn't working at all and then oh the heavens opened and you saw the base camp method how did that come about?

29:17 *Travis: * Yeah no actually it was more yeah it was more of an evolution than anything forming the team we had you know a lot of experience working in waterfalls or hybrid waterfalls or agile scrum or hybrid scrum combo and like we were lucky enough in our careers to touch on all these different software development methodologies and project management methodologies we would try to kind of build our own fun awesome hybrid of those kind of things we were doing some very similar ideas and concepts like the tick-tock and it's almost like hey work and cool down and we were doing

29:47 *Travis: * developing these kind of things and trying them out on projects reevaluating how did that project feel you know how do we feel about that these are tweaks we want to make that kind of stuff and then they came out with the book and then we always again we always followed what 37 signals has done Dave and I really like a lot of what they do we don't really 100% but we like a lot of what they do and how they talk about things and how they want to go about developing software so when they came out with the book it was like oh actually this is just kind of codifying a lot of the thoughts giving us new thoughts

30:17 *Travis: * kind of an evolution of where we were just trying to go anyway and so it wasn't kind of as much as an aha moment it's just like an evolution of like oh yeah this this totally fits this actually is they spent a lot more time and you know obviously writing a book a lot more time thinking through the whole philosophy the process the flows this kind of stuff and just putting it down and what really is nice is it gives us a document that we just basically get the hand to every employee and say okay hey this is how we build software

30:47 *Travis: * This is great Travis thanks for taking some time to walk us through Shape Up. If folks want to read more about this we've actually covered a lot of this content here in a blog from July of 2021 called Always Be Shipping and on time for dinner why we use Shape Up. So Travis why don't you tell folks where they might be able to find other information maybe from 37 on signals or otherwise where they can learn more about this?

31:15 *Travis: * Yeah you can go to basecamp.com for its last Shape Up that will take you to online documentation basically their online book you can read it for free they do offer buying a print edition if you like to carry something around you can listen to the rework podcast where they talk a lot about their philosophy and how they do things and I think there's even you know just search around Google and there's other companies that have been trying this and they're interesting takes and in other industries which I'm always fascinated with you know I try to read that

31:45 *Travis: * stuff as much as possible to help inform what we do because again we have our certain business context and how we do things and it's always good to expand and learn and grow and again like I said we're privileged to be a design focused company for developers and designers and that allows us to do certain things but I love to learn how other companies and other project managers and that kind of thing implement the Shape Up ideas for their context.

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