Shaping with a client

In the book, shaping happens before the betting table, by a few senior people working alone. They sketch, find the risky parts and write a pitch. Nobody on the build team sees it until the bet is made.

For an agency, shaping is also how you win and scope the work. The client is both the audience for the pitch and the source of everything you need to shape it. You cannot shape in a closed room, and you cannot hand over the pen either.

Who goes in the room

Two groups. Your shapers are the one or two people who can sketch the interface and judge the technical risk at once. The client side is the person who knows the problem best and the person who controls the money. These are sometimes the same person.

Keep the room small. Every extra stakeholder adds a preference you will have to resolve before the pitch is done.

Frame before you shape

Shape Up separates the problem from the solution, and the separation matters more with a client. A client who arrives with a solution (“we need a dashboard”) has already compressed a problem into a feature. Ask what happens today that makes them want it. Ask who is affected and what it costs when it goes wrong.

Write the problem down in the client’s words and read it back to them. If they change it, you have found out something worth knowing before the clock starts.

Do the sketching yourselves

The book recommends rough sketches that leave room for the builders. With a client in the room it is tempting to design live. Resist that for the interface and risk work. A client who watches you draw a screen will react to the screen, and the conversation moves from the problem to the pixels.

A workable pattern: one working session to frame the problem and agree on an appetite, a few days of shaping on your side, then a review where you walk the client through the shaped result. They respond to something concrete without having steered every line.

The pitch is the client’s document too

A pitch has five parts in the book: problem, appetite, solution, rabbit holes and no-gos. On client work, the last two do extra duty. Rabbit holes tell the client where the risk sits and what you have already patched. No-gos tell them what is out, in a form they can read and agree to.

One workable move is to attach the approved pitch to the statement of work. Then the scope conversation in week four has something to point to. The pitch says what the client asked for, the appetite says how much, and the no-gos say what was never included.

Watch for the pitch becoming a spec

Clients like documents they can mark up. A pitch with enough detail to mark up can drift into a specification, and then the builders have no room to cut scope when the time runs short. Keep the pitch at the level where the main flow and the key constraints are clear and screen-level detail is not.

Ryan Singer’s writing on the right level of detail when shaping is worth reading here. His test is to ask what the document is for.

When the client cannot take part

Some clients are too busy or too far from the problem. Then your shaper has to do more discovery on the client’s behalf: interviews, a look at the current process, a read of support tickets. Say plainly that the pitch rests on that discovery, and treat the client’s sign-off as confirmation that you understood the problem.

Questions people ask

Should the client attend shaping sessions?

Bring them in for framing and for reviewing the shaped result. Do the sketching and risk-hunting with your own shapers, then walk the client through it. A client in every working session tends to turn shaping into design by committee.

Is a Shape Up pitch a proposal?

It can be the core of one. A pitch states the problem, the appetite, a solution at the right level of detail, the rabbit holes and the no-gos. A proposal adds the commercial terms around it.