MBA1358 Must Read: Shape Up by Ryan Singer

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Hey, welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show where a better business is just ten minutes away with our daily ten minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. Today's episode is a Must Read episode on our Must Read Episodes. I share with you a book that I've read that has helped me, that has influenced me as an entrepr. I share with you its takeaways, its insights and why you should read it too. Today's must Read is Shape up by Ryan Singer. Shape up is a book written by the people from Basecamp. Basecamp is a highly successful tech company that has been around for decades. We at Webinar Ninja and the $100 MBA actually use Basecamp their tool and their founders, Jason Fried and David Hanemeyer Hansen are leaders in the entrepreneurial bootstrap self funded space. They both have written New York Times bestsellers in the past. Rework Remote and it doesn't have to be crazy at work. All books that I have had Must Read episodes on, but this book is a little bit different. First of all, it's written by somebody in the team of Basecamp, and that's Ryan Singer. This book is also not traditionally published. It's free. You can download a PDF version, you can read it online, you can check it out@basecamp.com Shapeup but the book is distinctively different because it gives you an inside look of how Basecamp works on projects. How do they develop the products they're working on in their business, their project management style. So if you ever wondered how a successful business actually gets there and how they actually do their day to day to plan and launch great things, this book is killer. Now when this book came out recently, this book is a bit controversial because a lot of the ideas in the way they do business is very different from what a lot of other businesses in the space do. And at the start of the book they do make it clear this is just how they do things. Take it the way you want to take it, take the good things, leave the things you don't agree with. And they make it very clear at the start of the book that this is how they do things. So in today's episode I'll share with you how they do things, why the book is so insightful, and why you should read it too. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. To put it simply, this book Shape up is a book on how Basecamp does product development. And if you're a software company or you're building an app, or even if you're selling any kind of digital good, I think this book would be tremendously helpful to you. Whether you're a founder, a cto, product manager, a product designer, there's lots of great insights and examples you can work off in this book. This book tackles a lot of common struggles that software companies go through, big and small challenges. Like team members not feeling like their projects are ever ending. They're constantly lasting forever. Product managers or CEOs have time to think strategically. Or maybe you're a founder and you feel like, hey, why can't we get features out the door like we used to? It's taken forever. Well, Basecamp saw these challenges and decided, hey, we're going to come up with some solutions and we're going to share it with the world in this book. The book starts out by explaining that they do everything at Basecamp in six week cycles. In fact, there's a heading in the book called six Week Cycles that explains this. They say six weeks is long enough to create something meaningful, but short enough to make the team feel like, hey, the deadline's just around the corner. Now I'm going to stop here because this principle right here that Basecamp starts with is one of the controversial topics people have been buzzing about talking about, feuding about on Twitter. People say a lot of things take longer than six weeks. They say this is all relative to the number of people you have on your team. They say, what about resources, money that factors in how many weeks something will take. I'm not saying any of these rebuttals are inaccurate, but I would say that they're kind of missing the point of what Basecamp is saying here. Whatever your resources are, no matter how big or small your team is, the idea of having a six week cycle forces you to narrow down the scope of the project and to release things regularly to your members, to your users, to the people that pay the bills, the customers. This is important because you want to make sure you keep reminding your customers why they love your product, why they chose your product. You keep adding value. It's also important because you want the team to feel like they're launching and releasing cool things. They're part of a team that does stuff that matters and does it frequently. And that feeling of releasing something new is a good feeling that you want your team to experience regularly. So no matter how big or small your team is or the resources, you could do this, you just have to break down the project that will fit into six weeks according to your resources. No one says that your project has to be this huge, huge, huge thing. You can take that huge thing and break it into different stages, different phases. I understand. I run a software company myself, Webinar Ninja, and we don't work in six week cycles. There are some projects that we're working on currently that have been going on for months because they're contingent on other things that we're working on and we got to release everything at once. But it doesn't mean that this principle is wrong. Just because there's an exception, it doesn't mean the rule is wrong. The next part he talks about in the book is shaping the work. I really love this concept because he talks about shaping the work before we give it to the team, before saying, hey, team, this is what we're going to do for the next six weeks. You need to kind of clean it up. They define the problem they're trying to solve, they define the key elements of the solution, and they decide if this project is even worth doing in the first place. They take a reverse approach. Most people say, hey, how long will this take to complete this project? But they use another metric called appetite. How much do we want to spend on this project? How much time do we want to spend on this? How much is this idea worth? Do we actually want to do this? Is it worth it for our customers? This allows you to work within constraints. And now what I like about this is because if you don't want to spend time on it, if you don't think it's worth it, then it doesn't make the cut. Right? It gets cut out, actually. And it allows you only to work on the things that will serve your customers and are worth working on. The next part, I also very much love, and that's giving ownership to the team to work on the project, giving them full responsibility. They have everything they need. There's the right players in the team to get this all done. Designers, developers, copywriters, whatever it is, they define their own tasks for the project. They adjust the scope so they can actually have the outcome we're looking for. They manage the timeline, all that stuff. Now, this is very different from what traditional companies do. The manager is the one that does all this, says, hey, team, this is the deadline, this is the scope, this is what's going to happen. Here are the milestones. At Basecamp, they actually give it to the team and they have several teams, smaller teams, working on different projects, and they say, hey, team, this is what we want to do. This is the outcomes we're looking for. You got to manage it. You got to build your own timelines, all that kind of stuff, and you're responsible for the outcome. Self manage. This is also controversial. Is it the team's job to manage itself or should they have a manager? Should they just be focusing on working on their own work and what they do best, whether it's designing or developing or writing or whatever it is. The book is broken up into three parts that kind of dive into all the details of what I just discussed. Part one is about shaping the pre work that needs to be done before the project begins. Part two is about bettering, choosing which of these projects that we shaped up, that we pitch, that we should dedicate our time to. And part three is building the expectations they place on their teams and the practices they do to get what they need to get done. Again, this book is totally free online@basecamp.com Shapeup. You can download a version of it or you can just read it straight on their website. And I personally think it's a good book to read just to challenge your ideas about how to run a team. You can see it as a thought experiment. You don't have to do everything it says, but at least you. You question the things that you do.

Okay, does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy QPC, some McNuggets, and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now so you do what you want.

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They accept Discover at Renaissance Fairs?

Yeah, they do here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Get it with the times.

With the times.

You're playing the loot. Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right?

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. Based on the February 2025 Nielsen report, today's Must read Shape up is actually a very quick read. You can read this whole book in one sitting. The most time consuming thing about reading this book though is often you'll stop and think to yourself, how do I do this in my business? How can I implement this idea? How can I improve upon this idea or improve upon this concept in my own business? I find that this book is very interesting because it's like getting the chance to visit Basecamp's office and shadowing the whole team for a week and seeing how they work on the day to day, how they organize their work, how do they collaborate and how do they agree on things. One thing's for sure at Basecamp is that they have a very strong company culture. They're one of the places that a lot of people would love to work at. In fact, I believe they were named one of the top places to work in America. So they're definitely doing something right. And the way they work as a team is not totally broken. You don't have to agree with everything they say, but learning and being aware of how other people do things can be incredibly helpful for you to gain perspective and gain insight to improve your own business and team. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 on the show again. You can check out today's must read Shape up over@basecamp.com ShapeUp absolutely free. Thank you Basecamp Team for that. If you love today's show, let us know in an iTunes rating and review. We read every single review and thank you in advance for that. Also, if you want to want to give back, share the show with friends and family. Whether you share it on social or just via word of mouth. Who's sitting next to you right now? Tell them about the show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you start reading this book and you find it quite helpful. Share the book with the rest of your team, with the rest of the managers on your team. Make it your book club book for the month and see what your team thinks. Make it clear, hey, we're not going to be applying the way Basecamp does everything in their business, in our business, but I just want to hear your thoughts about how they approach things. If we're going to improve things or change things on how we collaborate and work together, let's make sure we all agree or on board with those changes. Thank you so much for listening and I'll take you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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