I asked Process Street's Product Designer how Shape Up's development method works in practice. Want to know more about Shape Up? Check out what Ivy has to say.

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April 16, 2021
An Interview with Ivy: Shape Up From a Product
Designer’s Perspective
process.st/shape-ups-design-process
Molly Stovold
April 16, 2021
I wrote a post about Shape Up, a development methodology, and you the reader wanted me
to dive deeper. So, I did just that and interviewed Process Street’s Product Designer, Ivy.
Ivy answers common questions concerning how Shape Up works in practice, and although I
briefly touch on the core phases of Shape Up’s approach, this post should be seen as a follow
up to my original post which provides a full low-down of what Shape Up is and how it differs
from alternative development methods like Scrum and Kanban.
So, make sure to read my last post on Shape Up so you have all the context you need for this
post.
In this post, we’ll be covering:
Let’s kick things off with a brief re-cap of Shape Up’s key phases ‫ڀ‬.
What is Shape Up?

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(Source)
Developed by Basecamp, a project management tool, Shape Up offers an alternative to other
agile development approaches, such as Scrum or Kanban.
This section will touch on the core phases of Shape Up’s development approach. The section
should be treated as a reference point for Ivy’s answers later in the post. Anything she
mentions later is defined here.
Cycles
A cycle is Shape Up’s version of a sprint. With Shape Up, you can have a cycle of 2, 4, or 6
weeks. Although, Shape Up suggests working in cycles of 6 weeks as it’s long enough to finish
something meaningful and short enough to feel the deadline from the get-go. After each 6
week cycle, there is a 2-week cool-down period. After working hard to ship a project in 6
weeks, the cool-down periods are more flexible and allow the product teams to work on what
they like.
Shaping
There are four parts to this process:
1. Setting boundaries
2. Roughing out the elements
3. Addressing risks
4. Writing the pitch
Ultimately, in the shaping process, you determine what it is you want to address in the next
build cycle.
Betting

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At the start of each cycle, there will be a number of pitches. To choose which pitch to run
with, the Shape Up approach uses a betting table. This allows team members to choose which
pitch they want to bet on for the upcoming build cycle. The more bets and the more superior
the person betting, determine which pitch wins the bet.
Building
Cycles work on parallel tracks. Check out the image above for clarification. The upper track
includes anyone who is shaping and/or placing bets, and the lower track includes those who
are building. This means the team members who are shaping and betting run in unison with
those who are on the building track. Building, as the name suggests, is the phase where the
project for the cycle is built, by the product Engineers, Designers, or the EPD team (as is the
case with Process Street).
Circuit breaker
The circuit breaker motivates teams to take ownership of their projects. It’s a risk
management technique that involves canceling projects by default if they don’t ship in one
cycle. It turns the tradition of extending by default on its head.
More resources
In 2019, Ryan Singer, Head of Strategy and Product at Basecamp, got the Shape Up approach
down on paper in the digital book “Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that
Matters” which you can access here (it’s free). Alternatively, check out the Youtube video
below:
With the basics covered, let’s move onto my interview with Ivy, Process Street’s Product
Designer.
The makings of a Process Street Product Designer

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Who is Ivy, what led her to Product Design, and Process Street specifically?
Hey, I’m Ivy, Senior Product Designer. Originally from New York, and currently based in
Seattle. I started working in design almost by accident; I didn’t study design specifically. But,
when I first moved to the Bay Area, Bettable (a gambling platform) needed an illustrator and
that was my specialty at the time. I started off as an illustrator and over time they gave me
some graphic design work, and then they gave me the opportunity to hop into product
design.

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The really scary thing about that was that they had two product designers at the time, but
then they both left; leaving me to hold the reins as a newbie. However, the upside of that was
it gave me a lot of opportunity to grow without anyone holding my hand. I was left to do the
design work autonomously, so I learned a lot in a short period of time.
It was also at Bettable that I got my first taste for the startup life. I like startups because I
enjoy working on something that is up and coming, this also drew me to Process Street.
When did you start with Process Street?
August 2020. Along with heaps of other people. Because we’ve expanded so much, we have a
lot of new people on the EPD team. But in a way, I think this is a good thing (more on that
later).
What was your experience at other startups? And how does the Process
Street experience compare?
After Bettable I went to Zeus, which was a midsized dating company/ app based in San
Francisco. Zeus had a six-person design team. After that, I went to Carvana, which is a
massive company here in the US. At the time it had about 3000 employees. Their design
team was huge and had at least 15 people.
At Carvana, I was integrated into the team as a UI designer. But, the way Carvana did things
was to operate almost like a mini agency within the Design team. So, they had project
managers and different sets of teams for UX designers and UI designers.
The way that works is a UI designer designs the interface that people see, and the UX
designer designs the flows, the interactions, or the experience of how someone uses the
product. They’ll usually work in wireframe and then the UI designers use that as a blueprint
to create the final UI design.
What this meant was the workload was pretty divided. Whereas at Process Street, the
structure is completely different.
At Process Street the role is “Product Designer” which means that all the roles that were
divided up at Carvana, are packed into one. I do them all. That was specifically what I was
looking for.
Here at Process Street, I work directly with the Product Manager, Michael. We get together
twice a week to jam on some ideas, exchange feedback, brainstorm things we’re unsure
about, and go over upcoming features. At Process Street, I work very closely with the Product
Managers, whereas at Carvana, it was more like “here’s a task, go do some work, then come
back to me for feedback”; more of a distant exchange. In contrast, with Process Street,
Michael and I work very closely together.

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The same goes for the engineers. In every other role, including Bettable, but especially at
Carvana, there was a lot of division between the Design team and the Engineering team. They
were completely separate teams.
“Process Street is the first team I’ve had where Engineering, Product, and Design all work
together. That’s why they call it the EPD team.”
Not only do I work very closely with the Product Manager, but I also work very closely with
the Engineers. We hop on a stand-up meeting with Herbie and all the other Engineers that I
work with on projects.
Right now, seeing as I’m the only Designer, I’ll attend two team stand-ups for each of the
squads who are currently working on projects. During the meetings, I’ll answer questions and
I’ll show my work to them, so it’s a much closer collaboration between disciplines than I’ve
done in the past. Which is exactly what I was looking for.
We’ve expanded so much over the past year. How do you find working on
the product team with so many new team members?
It’s interesting because, at the same time as people have been coming in, a few people have
left. Madison (ex-Product Manager) being one of them. She’d been here for 4 years and was a
Process Street expert. The team went from having a complete expert to having a group of
employees that were still kind of figuring things out.
But in a way, it’s almost a good thing because I think sometimes you can lean too much on
old ideas of what the product was. However, by coming in with fresh eyes you have newer
perspectives; perspectives that are similar to the customers who are completely new to
Process Street. We newbies see it in the same way they do.
Everyone I have talked to who is newer to the company was confused about what the product
actually was coming in. I think that experience helps us newcomers shape the experience
better for new customers down the road.
Shape Up from a Product Designer’s perspective
“What really worked well was putting a strict timeline on projects. A very common problem
throughout the tech industry is that you start a project and then people keep adding scope
onto it.”
From a Product Designer’s perspective, what worked well?

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Strict timelines on projects mean that the problem of constantly adding scope is avoided.
Normally, in tech, you’d show something to someone and they’d say “Oh, what about this…”
and then before you know it you’re spending months getting something out. I’ve been on so
many projects like that.
I think what really is great about Shape Up is that you have 2, 4, or 6 weeks (cycles) to do a
project and you have to ship it out by then. At the end of a cycle, you have what’s called a
circuit breaker and after that you have to drop the project if it isn’t completed.
At Process Street, we aren’t super strict about the circuit breaker. For example, for the Slack
and Process Street integration project, we allowed another week. Given that there were good
marketing opportunities there we thought it extra important to get it in shape to present to
Slack. That said, in general we try to adhere to the circuit breaker as much as possible.
Shape Up allows space for us to say if we don’t feel that we will complete a project within the
cycle. The circuit breaker means we can choose to drop it. Pre-Shape Up, I always
experienced a lot of back and forth amongst teams as the feature or project might be more
important to some people than others. With Shape Up, we’re given the power to say “no, I
don’t think this works for this particular cycle”, or we just don’t have time to do it/do it well.
We can choose to cut the project for now and come back to it later which is really great.
When it comes to choosing what to run with/cut, who is involved in the
decision making process?
This is something we do in the building phase. During this phase, everyone makes a decision
together. For example this morning, Herbie the Engineer sent out a message saying he didn’t
think we should develop a certain feature within this cycle because there were technical
limitations that would make it very difficult. So later today, the EPD team will come to a
decision together about what they want to do about the feature. It’s rarely unilateral. If a
feature were to be cut, there should always be a good reason behind it.
Side note: Betting is mainly done by Michael and Ryan the Product Leaders, that’s when
they choose the projects that we (the EPD team) will be working on within the cycle.
What didn’t work so well?
The first cycle we did took some adjusting. For one, we allowed ourselves too little time to get
the project shipped. We saw that Shape Up recommended 6 weeks, but thought that was too
much time and that we’d run with a 4-week cycle instead. We basically allowed ourselves too
little time and then we couldn’t ship the project in 4 weeks.
I think there are also some blind spots in Shape Up that they don’t really prepare you for.
Such as there is no real phase for discovery. Discovery is where you dedicate time to thinking
through the problem, the flow, the implications of the feature, and how it would work in the

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user experience. That doesn’t really officially exist within Shape Up so we didn’t allow a lot of
time for that, because we were following the book as close to the letter as we could.
As a result, we had the Engineers start developing on a feature and then realized, when it was
in development, and after they’d done work on it, that the feature just simply wouldn’t work.
This meant the Engineers had to discard the work they had done on the feature.
This could’ve been avoided if we had done a bit more work on the discovery phase. As a
result, we now have a process called “Certification” which is where we decide concretely on
what we’re going to build. This allows us as Product People to think through the implications
of a problem. It also provides the Engineers a chance to do discovery of their own so they can
research technical bits, like libraries and tools, that they could use to build stuff. I think
Certification gives us more time to plan for the cycle, within the cycle.
Certification is a Process Street thing as far as I know. Not officially part of Shape Up’s
development methodology. Although, Shape Up does imply that some form of discovery is
needed within the building phase. Process Street expands on that with Certification.
What surprised you?
I was surprised that we were able to get something out so quickly. This is not usually the case
in the tech world, projects get bogged down by scope creep, by deliberation, and so on. The
fact that we were able to get out this significant change to the templates page in 4 weeks was
incredible to me. I rarely ship things to completion that quickly. Usually, even smaller UX
changes or larger projects that take months to push out.
At Carvana, I worked on something that took a full year to ship from the moment that I
started working on it in the design phase to it being shipped out to customers. That’s what I
was used to before Shape Up, things taking months or even years to ship.
The fact that we can get something out that makes an improvement to the UX in such a short
period of time is just amazing.
What was hard about the adjustment/what was easy?
It wasn’t personally hard for me because Shape Up plays really well into the way that I prefer
to work, which is very snappy and from the hip. I prefer to go with the flow and address
problems when they come up, which is the way Shape Up works. Even if you do Certification
like we currently do, things will still crop up that you don’t expect. Such as the comment
made today.
I think Shape Up will help you naturally transition to an adaptable way of thinking, that flows
so you can address problems as and when they come up. No matter how prepared you are,
you can’t possibly account for everything. I feel very comfortable working within this kind of
space and I think Shape Up is a great fit for me.

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How did you convince the EPD team to just abandon a feature when it isn’t
done in time?
I’m not usually the one to make this call. But, if we go back to the first cycle we ever worked
on, that’s a good example of how Shape Up provides you with an opportunity to stop a
project. Midway through the building phase and towards the end of the cycle, the EPD team
got together to go over all of the implications and how long it would realistically take to
finish. And together, as a team, we realized that there just wasn’t enough time within the
cycle to ship the feature.
The day-to-day Shape Up experience as Process Street’s Product
Designer
“Building is when I start to be more actively involved. Sometimes I’ll start working on designs
ahead of the building phase just so that we can hit the ground running”
Walk me through Shape Up, as experienced by you, Process Street’s
Product Designer …
Shaping and betting are when we as a team decide what projects were going to be working on
within a cycle. This is typically led by the Product Leads; they are the ones that write the
pitches and describe the features we might build. I’ll often contribute by helping the Product
Lead flesh out ideas or visualize them better. I might create a basic mockup for him, or make
suggestions. Overall, shaping and betting is mostly led by the product leaders.

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The building phase is when I’ll start refining parts of the design, I’ll format and organize the
designs so the engineers can focus on what they need to do. I’ll annotate things and point out
what changes are being made. Likewise the product people or engineers can point out where
I should spend more time, what needs fleshing out, and so on.
The way we approach it is that we start with a design that’s about 60 or 70% there/done.
Then the Engineers will start working on it. As things start to crop up, I’ll work on those
specific parts of the design to better clarify what wasn’t clear the first time around.
It seems like it’s a real group effort following Shape Up’s approach. What
was it like before the team moved to Shape Up?
At Process Street we already had the EPD team, so we were already working quite closely
together. One big change is that we’ve massively cut down on our meetings. Before we had
heaps of meetings to build consensus, for stand up, and to talk things over. I don’t even
remember what they were all for, but we had a lot of different meetings!
I think the fact that Shape Up is so directed and each cycle is so specific allows us to have less
meetings, more focus time, and to really get into the stuff that we’re working on. The
direction that Shape Up offers really helps to minimize the levels of ambiguity. This means
that there is less need for lots of meetings. Everyone knows what the goal is and what their
role is in achieving that goal. We can do a lot more work asynchronously as opposed to
spending all of our time in meetings.
Do you have any tips/hacks for any Product Designer’s considering making
the move to Shape Up?
I think for some people it will be more of a transition than it would be for others based on
your team’s structure. If your design team is very separated from your other teams, then it
will be significantly more difficult. That said, if you want to be successful in Shape Up, you
have to be comfortable with working very closely with engineers and taking their feedback.
You can’t work in a silo with Shape Up, at least I don’t think you can do it successfully. You
have to take things as they go, and be ready to go with the flow and be aware that things will
crop up that you aren’t prepared for. Another major thing is being comfortable in saying no,
and being aware of the engineering cost vs what is necessary for the design.
Shape Up’s design process: Key takeaways
1. Learn to say no, and be ok with it. ‫م‬ϼ‫ـ‬
2. To be successful, you need to embrace the power of the team. ѯ
3. Say goodbye to meetings and work asynchronously. ыϾ
4. Consider adding Certification to your Shape Up process to give yourself more time to
plan for the cycle within the cycle. ‫ד‬

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5. Be adaptable, and go with the flow. ҧ
Thanks Ivy!
The Shape Up approach is still fairly new for us at Process Street. Despite this, it is already
working wonders. We’ve cut our development cycle by 70%, the EPD team have ditched
unnecessary meetings, and as an outcome of this, they have heaps more focus time. Simply
put, Shape Up helps us to ship, and ship quickly.
P.S: Don’t forget to subscribe to the Process Street blog to get notified of our upcoming
articles. We also have a podcast “Tech Out Loud” featuring content written by respected
industry leaders such as Peep Laja, Sujan Patel, Tomasz Tunguz, and more! ‫ڀ‬