Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37 Signals about the better way to work and run your business.
Learn how 37signals uses the Shape Up method to write effective product pitches that guide teams without over-specifying details.
Key Takeaways
- Pitches serve as directional guides, not detailed specs, enabling teams to innovate within set boundaries.
- Fixed time budgets replace traditional estimates, promoting efficient and flexible product development cycles.
- Anyone can propose ideas, but formal pitches are crafted by designated individuals to decide next work.
- Avoiding over-specification prevents wasted effort and supports iterative discovery during development.
- Clear communication through pitches helps align teams and stakeholders on the problem and desired outcomes.
Summary
- The Shape Up method by 37signals emphasizes writing pitches as directional documents for product development.
- A pitch is about 800 words, includes a problem statement, customer feedback, and a rough solution sketch.
- Pitches provide enough guidance for teams to understand the goal but avoid detailed specs to allow flexibility.
- Overly detailed specs lead to reliance on estimates and a waterfall approach, which Shape Up avoids by focusing on budgets.
- Anyone in the company can pitch ideas, but formal pitches that define upcoming work are usually written by designated people.
- The pitch balances between vague one-liners and exhaustive specifications to give teams clear boundaries and priorities.
- Shape Up rejects traditional estimates in favor of fixed time budgets, allowing teams to shape solutions within constraints.
- The process encourages collaboration and iteration, with teams making final implementation decisions during the build phase.
- Different teams may have their own pitch writers, but the core idea is to maintain clarity and flexibility in product direction.
- The podcast hosts discuss the importance of pitches in avoiding miscommunication and ensuring alignment on product goals.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
If you've been following along with the podcast, you've heard us mention Shape Up, which is 37 Signals' philosophy around product development.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
And today, I'm joined by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of 37 Signals to talk about one of the elements of Shape Up, writing a pitch.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
We talk about it all the time, writing a pitch, but just so we're all on the same page, Jason, why don't you jump in and tell us like first, before we get into the details of a pitch, what what is a pitch?
Speaker Jason Fried
Yeah, so whenever we decide to build a new feature in one of our products, or actually build a new product, but this is primarily around building new features.
Speaker Jason Fried
Um, you know, we'll think it through, we'll talk it over, and then we'll write a pitch.
Speaker Jason Fried
A pitch is essentially, um, a direction.
Speaker Jason Fried
That's how I think about it.
Speaker Jason Fried
It's not details, it's not full-blown details, here's every little thing this thing needs to do, but it's a directional statement, it's a directional document saying, this is sort of the idea we're after here, we want to add this feature to this product, here's essentially why.
Speaker Jason Fried
Here's some things, some feedback we got from customers, which is a common format we we now include in our pitches, and here's kind of the problem we're trying to solve.
Speaker Jason Fried
It's not detailing exactly how to solve it, it's a suggestion for how to solve it, it's a maybe a first shot, sketch and description of how to solve it.
Speaker Jason Fried
Uh, and then it's sort of, you know, it's about 800 words typically, something like that, and then it's it's given to a team.
Speaker Jason Fried
And the team then takes that and transforms that into actual real work.
Speaker Jason Fried
So they they take this direction and then figure out how to get there in the amount of time we've allotted to it.
Speaker Jason Fried
That's essentially what a pitch is, so it's mostly words, it's a sketch or two, it might be a little bit of evidence here and there, but it's about 800 words or so and um, with that, whoever's working on the thing knows what to do.
Speaker Jason Fried
They look at that, they read it, they get go, I I know what this is about.
Speaker Jason Fried
Now I got to figure out how to make it happen.
Speaker Jason Fried
That's sort of the extent of the pitch.
Speaker Jason Fried
What you want to be careful of is you don't want the pitch to be so, um, detailed that it's it's six pages long and lays out every little thing in bullet points because now you're writing a spec.
Speaker Jason Fried
And specs aren't really where to go because you don't really know what you're going to need to do until you actually get into the work itself.
Speaker Jason Fried
So this is enough to point you in a direction and then leave you alone.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
It's also a counter to what happens at a lot of places, which is, we want to do this thing.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Often because a customer suggested it, and you get a one-liner.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
No one has actually thought through what this means or what it takes to build it and have not arrived at a common place of understanding of if we actually built the thing, is that what we want?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Is that roughly the shape of something that would soothe the problem if that's what we're trying to to tackle?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So, I feel like a lot of shops end up in one or two buckets, either, as Jason say, they end up with these overly specified specs, where they write everything out, there's a bunch of methodologies and use case techniques you can use to minutely detail, here's everything that you can do, and you can give it to a team that then almost does not even have to understand the problem.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Because they are simply implementing a design that someone who had carefully thought through it would do.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And then you have the other end of it, which is, hey, here's just a one-liner, here's just a ticket.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Oh, we should, um, we should add Kanban to to Basecamp.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You could imagine that in your head, right?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Like there's a card that says, just add Kanban.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
What does that mean? What is the shape of that? Where's the cutoffs? Where are the tradeoffs? Um, we're trying to find something that fits in the middle to be enough of a structure that a team has a idea of where the boundaries is, where the epicenter is.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
What's really important here, if we didn't do this one thing, would it really be the thing anymore?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Um, without overly specifying everything they need to do. And the reason, in part, why you don't over specify is, A, because most of these problems, you just, you don't know until you start building.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We don't know exactly what you want until you start building.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And B, if you specify everything in minute detail, what you end up relying on is estimates. Now, here's a complete thing, 100% of everything that needs to be done, how long is that going to take?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You can't run like we do with cycles, you can't say this exact thing that I've just specified over six pages in minute detail with fine stencil drawings is going to take five weeks, six weeks.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That is the traditional sort of waterfall-ish approach to software development that has failed for decades upon decades.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And the key innovation, if you will, of of Shape Up is to to flip that.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
To let go of estimates, forget estimates, and focus on budgets.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
But you can't have budgets together with specs.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So if you want buck budgets, that is, hey, do you know what, we think this problem is worth four weeks, six weeks, you have to leave it loose, you have to leave it bendy.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And that means just describing things in in enough detail that a team that actually then starts implementing can make the real final choices of what this thing is supposed to be.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
While not just sending them off on a wild goose chase where if they end up building something.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Jason goes afterwards, what's this?
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Okay, also tell me who writes these pitches?
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Like, is it just the head of product or can any run write a pitch about anything?
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Is it designers, programmers, customer support?
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Kind of talk me through that.
Speaker Jason Fried
Kimberly, you just wrote a pitch.
Speaker Jason Fried
So, you know.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
I did.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
I'm pretending I don't know.
Speaker Jason Fried
Yeah, I get you. No, um, anyone can can write a pitch.
Speaker Jason Fried
Um, pitches that are directly related to project work, typically written by a few people who are who are designated the people who are writing the the pitches and deciding what work to do next.
Speaker Jason Fried
But anyone can pitch an idea.
Speaker Jason Fried
So there's a couple different, the lingo is a little bit strange, right?
Speaker Jason Fried
Because anyone can come up with an idea and pitch it and say it out loud or write something up.
Speaker Jason Fried
But the formalized pitch, I still don't think we have the right language for this, by the way, um, this is what we've also called like a shaping document, but that doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
Speaker Jason Fried
A formalized pitch is work that we're going to do.
Speaker Jason Fried
Um, but people can pitch an idea.
Speaker Jason Fried
So people will pitch ideas all the time, Doran, one of our designers just pitched an idea for how we could, um, uh, change the way we organize things on the homepage inside Basecamp.
Speaker Jason Fried
It wasn't a formal pitch, it was just an idea that he shared.
Speaker Jason Fried
Uh, and then we took some of those ideas and had some other ideas and and and molded that into a formalized pitch.
Speaker Jason Fried
So, it's a tricky set of words and I think people get caught up, we get caught up on it sometimes.
Speaker Jason Fried
Um, but the real way to think about it for us is a formalized pitch is what determines what we're doing next.
Speaker Jason Fried
But people can throw ideas out and or pitch ideas out, but it's almost better to say throw ideas out, not throw them away, but throw them out there, um, if you're just want to share something.
Speaker Jason Fried
But it also depends on different teams, so like, uh, support might have their own collection of people who are pitching next things to do.
Speaker Jason Fried
Um, ops might have that, you know, so there's not three people or two people dedicated to do this company-wide.
Speaker Jason Fried
But on a given team or product area, there's typically one or two people who are in charge of that piece of work.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
One way that uh Ryan Singer, who compiled the original Shape Up uh book.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Here at 37 Signals and now works as an individual consultant, has um proposed afterwards is this notion of framing.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Which is essentially the step before pitching.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Where you define the problem and the business value in solving, but don't actually specify what the solution is. And I think having some distinction between those two things.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
A pitch is a an attempt at a solution, is attempt to, again, this is where words get overloaded.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
I was just about to say frame the solution.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Um, but then you really overloaded.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Where where the pitch defines what the what the solution is. And at a bunch of companies, you have people who want to propose that we work on certain problems.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
But they're not the ones who are going to design the solution. This is what uh Ryan now calls framing.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Um, and we've had that too, where sometimes, for example, in support, they might be hearing about some problem all the time, and they go, we need to fix this.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
But it's not always the that um support is the right unit to come up with what the actual solution is.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Because one of the key things to note when you're dealing with customer feedback is customers are exceptionally good at telling you their problems.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They know exactly where it hurts.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
What they're not always so good at is to tell you how to alleviate it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Because that's why you're a software designer.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And I think actually a lot of software is bad because um user-centric development shops, that's the positive spin here, simply take what a customer says.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You should add this button on this part of the page because that's exactly what I need.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And they go like, oh yeah, yeah, the customer's always right.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Let's just add the button.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You do that for like three years across thousands of customers, and all of a sudden you have 5,000 little buttons that all individually solve some tiny little problem, but does not constitute a cohesive solution.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's why software development is A hard, and B rewarding.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Because you take this mass, this flood of problems and feedback that people give you, and then you try to spot big patterns.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So, often, as Jason said, we now do this explicitly, the pitch will reference maybe five customers who complained about something that the pitch is trying to address.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
But what you'll often find is that those complaints, they point to specific solutions.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Because that's how people verbalize their annoyance that they have.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They say, you should have this, they not so often just say, I have this problem, could you fix it for me?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They present it in the form of you should fix this, but a good shaper takes two steps back.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Looks at maybe five, 10, 20 different complaints that perhaps don't seem like they're related, but all are due to some underlying problem that you could shape a pitch to solve.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So, separating those two things, what's the problem, what's the solution.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Different people can identify a problem, and then you probably want someone who has, if not outright training in it, some expertise to come up with the pitch.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And I think that's another thing that's just really important for this whole pitch process.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Is that the people who work on the solution have to have awareness and context about how to solve it. You can't actually have a good pitch written by someone who don't know how to build software.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Because they don't know what the constraints are, they don't know what's reasonable, what's plausible, what cuts, as we like to say, with the grain of the existing system that you have.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
If you just asked essentially a customer, you could say, hey, what do you want?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They're going to come up with their thing in their blue sky way of thinking.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They're not necessarily a software designer.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They don't know the internals of the system.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's not a way to end up with a pitch that's going to be a really nice solution for something that fits inside of six weeks.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Well, I also think it's interesting as I read pitches about our product feature that have been written.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Like this is what we're working on the next cycle.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
That solution very often isn't execution.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
It's just like, this is what we're trying to get to.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
And there's a couple ways to go about it, but it's kind of left up to, correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Like the designer and the programmer are actually coming up with how to execute that.
Speaker Jason Fried
Yeah, the team of two who's assigned to the work, um, they have to solve the problem.
Speaker Jason Fried
Like we, we suggest a solution, but that's the words aren't the solution.
Speaker Jason Fried
Uh, the the paragraphs aren't the solution, they explain a potential solution, but the solution is the actual work itself, the interface, the back end, the the experience, whatever it is, that's their role, that's their job.
Speaker Jason Fried
So they take that and then with help if they need it, they figure out how to make that happen within the given time with all the constraints and tradeoffs that they have in front of them.
Speaker Jason Fried
And uh, and sometimes cutting the scope or adding the scope or changing the scope, again, this is not defined, this is not a list of what it needs to be.
Speaker Jason Fried
That's not what the pitch has in it, because if you have that, then you have conflicts, it's like, well, it said it had to do all these things, I can't change that because it said it had to do these things.
Speaker Jason Fried
That's not how it really works, it's here's what we think it should probably do, here's the problem we're trying to solve.
Speaker Jason Fried
If you have a better version of that or a better idea or look, we're running out of time, we can't do it all, what's most important part of this and what can we lose.
Speaker Jason Fried
They can negotiate that with the project itself and sometimes with me or Brian or David or whoever is involved or Jeff or whoever it might be, um, and uh, and figure out the best way forward to actually execute and build and design and and ship this thing to customers.
Speaker Jason Fried
So, that's how that works.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And I think that's why pitching and that whole way of framing what are we going to work on.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Is such a powerful tool, not just for getting what you want, but for getting the kind of people that you want.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You want people who can embrace the autonomy of making decisions on their own and actually have to dive into the problem to flex that autonomy.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
When you dive into a problem, you understand that problem.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And when you understand the problem, the work is just more interesting, when people talk about code monkeys.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
It's usually in terms of, do you know what, you're just going to be given something, I want exactly this output, you just uh put the the bolts together.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Here's a Lego sheet.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Don't divert, the colors need to go exactly as it is, you're just putting pieces together.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Now, it could be fun to put Legos together.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
I actually enjoy putting Legos together from like a exact description of it, but what I've found at least with my kids, they like building their own stuff more.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Not that it can't be fun to follow a description.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
But there's more of an expression of creativity and you feel like you're advancing across multiple dimensions at the same time, when you actually have to understand the problem and you have the trust and power to come up with new solutions.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
I think this is one of the most gratifying parts of this whole process.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Is that Jason and I might sit down, work together on a pitch, think we've got this cracked, think we could have analyzed our way all the way to a perfect solution.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
The team starts building it and they go like, yeah, do you know what, that just doesn't work.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And then you show an in-progress piece of uh work and you go like, oh yeah, you're right.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
This is this is clunky.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Like it sounded good, it it drew well, but it doesn't actually implement well.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So then the team goes like, okay, then what do we have to do instead?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's the magic of deferring so many of the decisions of the design until you have to work with the materials themselves.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Because the materials will reveal shortcuts to you.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They will reveal better ways of doing it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
But you don't know that before you're in it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
This is again, the reason why all software that's planned for the long term is always failing, always behind schedule.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Is because you just can't know all the stuff up front.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Even on a six-week project, usually the best we can do with the pitch is like we can give you a really good direction for the first two weeks.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
The first two weeks, like, pretty likely that our guesses are correct.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You get into week three or week four, more and more will the direction start to diverge from the map.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's a good thing.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Like that at least needs to be in the context of it, and especially because we do this whole budget thing.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We say, do you know what, this is worth six weeks.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
The map tells you, you should walk in this direction, but if you get halfway there and you go like, do you know what, there's no way we're going to make it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We're going to need a shortcut here.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You have to power to come up with that shortcut.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So, I really like um Daniel Pink's Drive 2.0 book.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And he spells out these three pillars of employee satisfaction.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They are autonomy, number one.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Mastery, number two.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And three, purpose.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
To me, pitches draw on all of those, you give the autonomy that someone can come up with their own path of how to solve this within some broad boundaries.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
There's intense mastery of doing that process, not just asking someone else what the solution should be, but actually having to figure it out yourself.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And then the purpose of building something being an integral part of it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Not just a quote unquote code monkey, but part of the process of coming up with it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Is just so gratifying, when you put those three forces together, you get people working on stuff that feels like, do you know what, this is good.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
This is fun.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And once you do that, you have a much better chance that you can go the distance.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We can do six cycles a year, it's actually interesting, gratifying work that you can continue to do for a long time.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Which is one of the reasons why we have quite a few people at 37 Signals who have been here for a long time.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
This is many of the same attributes that Jason and I take away from our satisfaction of being here for 20 years.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Autonomy, mastery, purpose.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Okay, well, in Shape Up, there is five details that go into making a pitch.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Problem, appetite, solution, we've talked about those.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
The last two are rabbit holes and no-gos.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
You guys kind of talk me through those.
Speaker Jason Fried
Um, well, rabbit holes are these things that sort of for a second, I think, kind of look appealing, maybe.
Speaker Jason Fried
And then you start to go down the rabbit hole and you can get stuck there forever.
Speaker Jason Fried
Uh, it goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
Speaker Jason Fried
And then you find yourself just swirling in this hole where you're working and working and working, but not getting anywhere.
Speaker Jason Fried
Uh, and we try to avoid those because, um, uh, sometimes there's there's like something at the bottom of that that's necessary to get to.
Speaker Jason Fried
But often times, it's it's a trap.
Speaker Jason Fried
Um, and so, you know, whenever something seems like it's sort of circling or a lot of work is happening, but nothing's really you're not really getting anywhere, there's a good chance there's a rabbit hole there.
Speaker Jason Fried
So we're very careful about those situations and kind of want to spot them early so you don't get trapped.
Speaker Jason Fried
Uh, and then it gets hard to get out of them.
Speaker Jason Fried
Um, that's how I would define them.
Speaker Jason Fried
I don't know if David has another take on that or.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Yeah, I think a good way to illustrate this is with an example.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So we were just recently working on defining a um time zone auto completer.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So we were building something where we needed to um let the users specify the time zone that something was going to happen in.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
There's a lot of different ways you can specify that, um, a really fancy way that um Apple's Ical actually use is it'll do this mapping between, you can type any city in the world, more or less, and they will do this geo lookup where they find out which time zone that city is actually in, and then they'll auto complete it and they'll set it up.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's a really neat solution that's actually quite technically advanced and complicated.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And perhaps that's worth it in some instances where that's something you do all the time and you pick different time zones constantly and you don't even know which time zones you're in, but for what we were working at, do you know what, that smelled like a rabbit hole to me.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That smelled like if we went down that, we would be adding very incremental value to the experience.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
On something that wasn't going to happen all that often, when we could also do something else.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We could also just do a drop down list.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Just do a list, you could do a normal list that's just alphabetically sorted.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And you go like, okay, well, that also doesn't quite feel right.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Perhaps, um, I was relaying the example.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
When I work with time zones, I often work with like two.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
I mean, like two different places, or Jason is in one place.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
I'm in another place.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They're sort of stable, so what I normally do is like, I just have like a handful of time zones I need to pick it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
I don't need to pick against all 180 time zones that could, I don't even know how many time zones there is in the world.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
There's probably not 180.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
But there's a lot of different time zones.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And mapping those to specific cities and joy.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That was not where the value was.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So, when you spot that rabbit hole early and go like, wait a minute, we're making this form, it has maybe five elements in it, one of them is a time zone thing.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
If you spend all your time coming up with the gold plated geo IP lookup, city to time zone thing.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You're going to spend like five of your weeks on that and you're going to leave one week for the rest.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's a rabbit hole.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And spotting those rabbit hole up front is a good way of just defining the tradeoffs that you can at least anticipate.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So that the team doesn't go in and think like, oh, do you know what, the bar for this is here.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So much of shaping is not just about, here's what to focus on, but here's what not to focus on.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Here's how we're going to liberate your attention and your time to focus on the epicenter.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Because we explicitly say this thing, this thing, this thing, that's a rabbit hole.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's out of scope.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Uh, that could be dropped.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Bringing that into part of pitching is sort of that negative space that in many cases are even more important than the the positive space of what we're going to do.
Speaker Jason Fried
We've also used the term science project.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Yeah, science project is essentially like the macro version of a rabbit hole.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
A rabbit hole is like, hey, here's one component of a feature that we're doing.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Science project is what we actually usually term entire pitches, a good example, I saw someone bring this up in the Basecamp community project.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Someone was asking about tables in our text editor.
Speaker Jason Fried
We worked on it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We we totally worked on it, but I don't think we announced it publicly, but we may have hinted at it in the Basecamp community and that's how this person knew about it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Uh, plug, by the way, for the Basecamp community if you want to get that kind of early insight to things we're working on.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
But that was an example of something we worked on, and we knew going in, this was a science project.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Like the whole pitch was a rabbit hole.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Because we knew it was quite complicated to get at, especially in the time zone, I think we set aside like four weeks to do it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We knew it was a science project.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We knew there was a fair chance that we weren't going to be able to deliver.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And that's what happened.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We dug into it, spent several weeks on it and realized, do you know what, this is software.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You can fix anything, you can literally do anything, we could make the text editor, I don't know, send a person to the moon.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You can change any piece of software into any other piece of software given enough time and resources.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We weren't going to give it enough time and resources within that scope to do it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We learned a bunch of things.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's the other thing that's good about these science project.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Sometimes like you just, the project or or the hypothesis fails to replicate.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Do you know what?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's science.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's information.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
That's that's feedback.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Um, but it didn't it didn't pan out.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
So we take the the science project label is a way for us to mark a pitch of going like, do you know what, this is not going to have the same odds of success of shipping as our normal pitches.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We know this.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Eyes wide open.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Um, another word we've used about this when we um do somewhere between a science project and a rabbit hole is the traceable bullet.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
This is we come up with all these terms to describe these.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
I I sometimes think of it as the vocabulary we come up with, it's like, um, and maybe this is even just an urban legend, but like Eskimos have like eight words for snow.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Like they're different versions.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Like if you're really, this is your work, this is your environment.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You will be you will come up with more and more, well, jargon to some extent, right?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Anyway, traceable bullets for us is this idea.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We're working on a new project, um, product.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We are actually working on a new product right now.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We've fired multiple traceable bullets.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Where it's sort of like a pitch.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
But we're unclear of even how much this is going to take.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Um, we need to do like a scaffold version of it or traceable.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
See where this lands before we can go further.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Um, so there's like.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
There's all these different marks on the um probability curve.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
On the um confidence curve in terms of what we start working on.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And I think developing, whether you call it traceable bullets in your company or something else.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Developing an eye for when are we sure about something?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
When do we have concerns about something?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
When do we think something could take the project off track here?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Um, and then finding ways of identifying that together, such that when the team dives in and actually attempts a solution.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
They have some idea of like, do you know what, you shouldn't step over there right away.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
You're going to fall down the rabbit hole.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Do you know what, we don't really know what the distance is here.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Can we fire a traceable bullet?
Speaker Jason Fried
We'll call it a spike also.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
A spike is another word that that we've used for that, right?
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Where you just go like, do you know what, dedicate two two days to this.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
See what's there, maybe the two days is a loss or it's never a loss.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
The two days is just an investment in information.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Um, actually, um, another example.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
I sometimes I think the examples actually help clarify this further.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
We were just looking into what it would take to do uh billing in other currencies.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And Anup, one of our programmers who've been working on our billing backend that's called Queen B, just fired off a traceable bullet.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
He spent two days looking into this problem, what would it actually take to plug in uh another way of doing it.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
And that helped us arrive at, do you know what, if we want to do this and we want to do it right, it's going to take four weeks.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Before that we were like, I don't know if it's even doable in a single cycle.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
I don't know if it's going to be two weeks.
Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson
Now we can make an informed decision about whether to put that pitch onto betting table for this cycle.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Oh, well, David, that is a perfect transition because next week we're going to be talking about the betting table.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
What happens when all of these pitches are compiled and how things get decided on what we're actually going to work on.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
So that will be next week's episode, so join us for that.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
I'll also link in the show notes to Shape Up, we've been talking about, you can download a copy of Shape Up for free at 37signals.com/books.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
You can also find a link to purchase the book there if you're more of the type that likes to flip the pages.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
If you're a small team, last plug, we mentioned it last week, competing against bigger teams and you're scrappy.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
You're an underdog, and we want to hear from you.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
If you'll go to our LinkedIn post, comment with the picture of your team and your underdog story, we'll be selecting one of you to join us on a future episode of Rework.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Rework is a production 37 Signals, you can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
Full video episodes are also available on YouTube and Twitter on X, on YouTube and X.
Speaker Kimberly Rhodes
And if you have a specific question for Jason or David about Shape Up, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850 and we just might answer it on an upcoming show.
Topics:Shape Up37signalsproduct developmentwriting a pitchsoftware developmentproduct managementagilefixed budgetsteam collaborationREWORK podcast
