Shape Up for client work / Chapter 1 of 8
Why the book’s assumptions break on client work
Shape Up was written by a product company about its own product. Four assumptions underneath it do not hold when the work is for a client.
Shape Up is the account Ryan Singer wrote of how Basecamp builds product. It works because of the conditions Basecamp builds under, and most of those conditions are invisible in the text. They show up the first time an agency tries to follow the book to the letter.
Assumption one: someone inside owns the product
The book’s betting table is a small group of senior people who decide what the company builds next. They share a product, a payroll and a stake in the outcome. When they say yes to a pitch, the cost is theirs to bear.
On client work, the person who says yes works for someone else. They may need sign-off from a director or a board. They may have been given the project last month. Their incentive is to look good inside their own company, which overlaps with the project’s success without matching it.
You can still hold a betting table. You have to find out who really decides and make that person the one at the table. Chapter four covers this.
Assumption two: time is the budget
In the book an appetite is an amount of time. The team is already on payroll, so six weeks of that team is a cost the company has already accepted. The question is what the company wants for it.
A client usually arrives with the opposite. They have a number of dollars, often set before anyone understood the problem. The money may have to be spent by a date, or approved against a fixed scope. Chapter three covers how to turn that number into a time box you can shape against.
Assumption three: nothing binds the scope
Shape Up leaves scope open on purpose. The team gets a shaped problem and decides what to cut to fit the time. Basecamp can do that because no outside party is holding a list of promised features.
An agency often has exactly that: a statement of work with deliverables in it. Flexible scope inside a fixed list is a contradiction, and clients feel it as soon as they notice a feature missing. The fix lives in the contract. Chapter five covers what to write there.
Assumption four: the team stays
Cool-downs, hill charts and the habit of moving on all assume the team will keep owning the product. Client engagements end. The people who handle the result afterward may be the client’s team or nobody. That changes what a good handover looks like and who pays for the clean-up work that cool-downs usually cover.
What carries over unchanged
Most of the method survives. Fixed time with variable scope is as useful to a client who has a launch date as it is to Basecamp. Shaping before committing keeps a client from buying a vague idea. Scopes and hill charts give you a way to report progress without padding. The circuit breaker gives you a rule for the day a project is not going to finish.
What changes is who is in the room, how the money is framed and what the paperwork says. The remaining chapters take those one at a time.
Before you go on. Read the book’s introduction and its appendix on adjusting to your size. The chapters here use its vocabulary throughout.
Questions people ask
Does Shape Up work for agencies at all?
It can. Several agencies and consultancies describe using it on client work, and the directory on this site links to them. It needs adaptation at the points where the book relies on an internal owner, internal money and the absence of a contract.
What is the biggest difference between product work and client work?
Who decides. At Basecamp the people shaping, betting and building share an employer and a product. In client work the person who decides what matters works for someone else and answers to their own budget.