Ryan Singer: recommendation

Transcript context

…So your product owner. So there's a big, big gap there. We could talk a lot about that, but there's gaps in context. The person who's writing the ticket doesn't actually understand the work that's involved. You know what I mean? So there are so many unknowns and time bombs waiting in those tickets that sound reasonable, but they weren't really created by the person who understands the work that needs to happen. So the key difference is two things. So in Scrum, you have a person who's not the builders making tickets, and this is what in the cruel picture is the paper shredder. In the shape-up world, you have a single idea that was shaped. This is the thing we shaped with the two months in the agenda view and da da. Go make your own tasks, because you're the professionals. Do you know what I mean? So the contractors, if you're building a house, they have to know the plans, but you don't have to tell them, "Now take the hammer and go over here." That's their, right? So in a shape-up world, a kickoff is, here's the well-shaped idea, and now this time box starts. At Basecamp, it was really, really loose because they are just stocked with senior people. They have so many very senior engineers and all the designers are coding. They're very technical, really, really skilled people. What I found is helpful when the team is a little bit more mixed, if they're not all super senior, is a simple exercise of at kickoff, take whatever was shaped and just draw a grid with nine boxes, and give me nine boxes of the nine major chunks that you think have to get implemented from an implementation standpoint. So translate this into nine major scopes of implementation that need to somehow happen over the time box. So really, really useful exercise to kick things off, and we have a lot of teams doing that now. If you take six weeks, that's 30 business days. You divide that by nine, it's four days per box. So you're going to get a lot of clarity from a quick exercise. And again, this is done by the builders. This is a really also good exercise for them to notice like, "Oh, wait a minute, we think there's too much scope here. Even though it seemed reasonable, when we put it into nine boxes, it's like, I don't think we can do this all. " Or it's also a good moment where somebody who's more junior might describe their implementation approach, and then someone who's senior can review that and say, "Actually, we've done that before, and we'll run into this trouble if we don't use this other thing. " So those really nice coaching moments can happen. If you were to try this approach and have a shaping session, this is a sign you're heading in a good direction, is if the output, the team that's building it can come up with nine... Does it have to be nine? Is six cool, 10 cool?…

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