To do that you’ll need to either embody these skills as a generalist or collaborate with one or two other people. It requires combining interface ideas with technical possibilities with business priorities. Team members don’t have enough information to make trade-offs. When a project is defined in a few words, nobody knows what it means. On the other end of the spectrum, projects that are too vague don’t work either.

This leaves designers no room for creativity. When design leaders go straight to wireframes or high-fidelity mockups, they define too much detail too early. Product managers often err on one of these two extremes. When we shape the work, we need to do it at the right level of abstraction: not too vague and not too concrete. Part 1: Shaping Chapter 2: Principles of Shaping Part Three is about Building - the expectations we place on the teams and the special practices they use to discover what to do. Part Two is about Betting - how we choose among the pitched projects and decide what to do six weeks at a time. Part One is all about Shaping - the pre-work we do on projects before we consider them ready to schedule. This book is about the risk of getting stuck, the risk of getting bogged down with last quarter’s work, wasting time on unexpected problems, and not being free to do what you want to do tomorrow. Other books can help you with that (we recommend Competing Against Luck). This book isn’t about the risk of building the wrong thing.

Book Summary of ‘Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles & Ship Work that Matters’ by ‘Ryan Singer’. Whether you’re looking to gauge if the full book is worth your time or want to revisit ideas you’ve already read, my summary should come in handy. I read the book & highlighted the key ideas to create a distilled yet detailed version of the subject matter.

Shape up basecamp