Ryan Singer: recommendation

Transcript context

…Shape your gut, put your gut. I've seen some Shape Up adoptions that looked like that by the way, and that's not the way. The shaping step is crucial. And what you mentioned with your landing page example, by the way, it's so seductive because we can imagine, oh, Parkinson's law, right? If you give me six weeks to do the landing page, I'll find a way to use it, but if you give me two weeks, then I'll stop after two weeks. But when it comes to real product work, where there's some functionality that we have to figure out how to make it exist, we can't just cut the scope if we run out of time. So, what it means is that the shaping work is really working hard together to figure out what are the main moving pieces of this thing. How do we narrow down our understanding of the problem and how do we identify what the moving parts are of the solution and what actually connects together for this feature to work? And when we really get to the level where we can say, "Oh, we need to do this, this, and then the engine is going to turn," that's the place where we can say, "Oh, this is well-shaped." And it's a different kind of work. In shaping in real life, we call it, we actually teach it as doing live shaping sessions, and this was how I did it for years with Jason. We'd get into the room and I had both the technical and the UX side, so both sides were represented there in one person in that case, but for a lot of teams today, we actually teach them how to bring the senior engineering person who isn't just senior in title, the one who actually knows where the bodies are buried, how the old stuff works and what's truly possible and what's hard and what's easy in our infrastructure, like the person that really knows. You bring that person together with the product person who deeply understands the backstory of why this is an opportunity and what we're trying to solve with this. And then a designer in the room and they're whiteboarding and wrestling with each other to get to what's a version of this thing that we believe in that's real that we can actually finish in that time. This is great. Let's go one level deeper on this shaping session. So, a few tactical questions. How long are these sessions? It sounds like the people that join are a designer and an engineer and an NPM. So, add anything else there. And when do they happen is at the end of a... Do you call it a cycle by the way or sprint, the six-ish week period?…

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