#438 Product Shape Up Cycle 7
Friday Ship #438 | April 11th, 2025
This week we wrapped up Shape Up Cycle 7 on the Product team.
Shape Up continues to be a revolutionary way of working for our Product team. We switched from an Agile way of working to Shape Up back in March, 2024. We continue to be astounded by how much of an impact this switch has had on our productivity as a development team. The largest gains for us seem to be rooted in:
- Having a “cooldown” period by which we can take the time to reflect and make explicit bets – this gives us the time to really focus on the most impactful bets we can make
- Lowering team overhead and maximizing focus time to deliver increments of work
Advantages of Shape Up over Agile Sprints
We had a couple of tension points with sprinting that added up to major execution issues:
- We had difficulty planning the next sprint while executing the current sprint
- We’d tend to design increments small enough that they’d fit inside of a single sprint; these increments would have commensurately little impact on the product and its users. In other words: short sprint cycles made us take less risk, and be less interesting as a company
Accomplishments During Cycle 7
Here are just a few of the things we bet on and shipped during Cycle 7:
- Shipped a brand new plugin for Mattermost that works with self-hosted instances (we’re planning a webinar with Mattermost in the near future to debut this feature)
- Shipped the first Beta version of our Insights feature to production
- Shipped a feature that joins new users to an appropriate and extant Org, if their email has been validated
- Made free teams Public by default
- Completed the architecture for adding SCIM as an Enterprise feature
- Prototyped a quantitative metric dashboard in Looked Studio for customer feedback
- Refactored one of our core backend services to GraphQL Yoga – we’re going to write an entire post on this next week!
Cooldown
Next week, the cooldown after Cycle 7 begins.
We’ve already begun collecting potential bets for Cycle 8. While we plan, the team will be working on exploration, passion projects, and bug fixes.
Metrics
A modest drop in activity this week, compared to the previous. Could it be spring break? Something else? We’re monitoring closely.
This week we…
…continued to make progress toward SOC-2 by adopting new risk management policies.
…continued shaping designs for user onboarding. Our Growth team also tested whether Gen AI could be used in our onboarding emails in order to be more helpful with what content is prioritized based on a user’s profile. The results look promising.
…planned webinars and marketing activations with new partners.
Next week we’ll
…enter cooldown before Product Development Cycle 8.
…finalize our first trimester strategy.
Jordan Husney
Jordan leads Parabol’s business development strategy and engineering practice. He was previously a Director at Undercurrent, where he advised C-Suite teams of Fortune 100 organizations on the future of work. Jordan has an engineering background, holding several patents in distributed systems and wireless technology. Jordan lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.