We’re revisiting Shape Up and product development thoughts with Ryan Singer, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp. Last August we talked with Ryan when he first launched his book Shape Up and now we’re back to see how Shape Up is shaping up — “How are teams using the wisdom in this book to actually ship work that matters? How does Shape Up work in new versus existing products?” We also talk about the concept of longitudinal thinking and the way it’s impacting Ryan’s designs, plus a grab bag of topics in the last segment.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019 OR changelog2020. To learn more and get started head to linode.com/changelog.
• Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
• Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

• Ryan Singer – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• The Changelog #357: Shaping, betting, and building
• Ryan’s new hobby podcast called Synthetic A Priori
• Shape Up (book site)
• “Good design requires thinking longitudinally.”
• New versus existing products
• Taguchi methods on Wikipedia
• Salt. Fat. Acid. Heat. -