Forget Basecamp. How to implement Shape Up in Monday.com
Shape Up is a wonderfully insightful book by Basecamp Head of Strategy Ryan Singer aimed at helping product teams ship software that matters. It harmonized with our own in-house practice of avoiding formal project methodologies like “Agile” and “SCRUM” in favor of our own leaner ways of getting things done in short-iterations with minimal overhead.
The free Shape Up online book lays out an alternative to software development cycles that are too long (or too short) and where epics, sprints, and story points are the focus. Instead, Shape Up advocates principles and processes that focus on shortening the cycle to get an idea into production to bring value to customers as soon as possible.
Shape Up is arguably an elaborate PR effort by Basecamp to acquire new customers for their subscription product.
While we wholly endorse the ideas, methods, discipline, and communication principles advocated in Shape Up — and we love its clarity of writing — we can’t get on board with their recommendation to use Basecamp (laid out in Shape Up appendix How to Implement Shape Up in Basecamp). Singer even goes so far as to write, “We built Basecamp to implement the Shape Up method.” Indeed, Shape Up is arguably an elaborate PR effort by Basecamp to acquire new customers for their subscription product. And it could very well be working. In fact, we signed up for Basecamp and conducted a ten-week evaluating of the Shape Up method: from shaping up, pitching and betting, to running a full six-week cycle with a two-week cool down in Basecamp. However, as ironic as it sounds, we found Basecamp competitor Monday.com has much more to offer teams looking to implement Shape Up. Compared with Basecamp’s clunky flagship product, Monday.com’s stellar UI, more flexible design, comprehensive feature-set, and better mobile experience, make it more enjoyable to use and a clear winner as a management tool for Shape Up.
It just goes to show: a superior product development process without stellar design talent will only take you so far.
Why Shape Up in Monday.com
Monday.com takes some of the best ideas from products like Basecamp, Asana, Trello, and Airtable, and fuses them into a product we truly love to use.
While there’s much to love about Basecamp’s work philosophy, it seems they’ve lost their focus when it comes to building products. Basecamp feels immature and neglected compared with modern productivity apps like Slack, Airtable, and Asana. Despite Basecamp’s penchant for describing their product as “simple”, the UI is downright awkward and lacking in many key areas, which I’ve gone into more detail about elsewhere. It just to show: a superior product development process without stellar design talent will only take you so far.
We encourage organizations to determine for yourself whether Basecamp or Monday.com is a better match for your teams by conducting your own trial with each product. But since there’s no official guide for implementing Basecamp in Monday.com, we created this document to help you get started.
First, we’ll provide an overview of some of the key features which give Monday.com a decided edge over Basecamp. Next, we’ll lay out the practices that we’ve come up with to help you get started implementing Shape Up in Monday.com.
Boards
At the core of Monday.com is a highly-customizable Airtable-like task list called a Board. The default Board view is a table structure of rows (called “pulses”) where you can create custom columns to augment and sort your data, as well as Groups and Filters.
The Filters you create for your Board can be saved as Views.
You can add dozens of different types of columns to your Boards.
And columns can be customized in many ways.
Nearly all these features are missing from Basecamp’s TODO list, which includes “Title,” “Assigned to,” “Due date,” and “Groups”. But no additional column types, filtering, sorting, views, or multi-item actions.
Additionally, Monday.com lets you easily select multiple items on a Board to perform multi-item (“batch”) actions, such as assigning all tasks to a user, moving several items to another board or setting their status to “Done”.
Additionally, a Board in Monday.com can be viewed as a Table, Form, Timeline, Calendar, or Kanban — among other views. A TODO list in Basecamp only has a single, fixed view.
In both Basecamp and Monday.com a “task” can contain details (called “Updates” in Monday.com) like notes, files, and discussion. In the two screenshots below you can see they are very similar.
Notifications, Teams, and Inbox
A good notification system is a critical component of any team management tool. While Basecamp’s notification system is pretty good, Monday.com includes a more comprehensive feature-set.
Monday.com has both a “bell notification” section and an Inbox. The bell notification section only shows updates that are relevant to you (e.g. items assigned to you). The Inbox is where you’re able to find all updates for all boards you are subscribed to.
In Monday.com, members can be assigned to Teams. Then, instead of adding individual team members one-at-a-time to your Boards and Pulses, you can simply add a whole team.
In Monday.com, you can also set Reminders to trigger notifications at a later time.
Implementing Shape Up in Monday.com
This guide assumes you’ve already read Shape Up. We won’t be going over the material here, so read Shape Up first (it’s free), then return here to learn how to get started doing Shape Up in Monday.com.
Tracking and Shaping Raw Ideas
Here’s how we track raw ideas in Monday.com.
- Create a Folder called “Raw Ideas”
- Within the Raw Ideas folder, create a raw ideas board for each person on your product team:
- Each team member is then free to organize their raw ideas using whatever columns, views, or filters they like. In my raw idea board, I create a Group for each product I’m working on. Then, I use rating columns to track “ease” and “impact” scores which helps me to determine relative priority. Other users have their own idiosyncratic ways of managing their raw ideas, such as assigning estimation values or organizing tasks by “epics”.
- Team members are free to invite others to give feedback on their ideas whenever they feel those shaped up ideas are coherent enough to merit the consideration of others. These discussions happen in the task’s Updates section.
Announcements
- Create a Folder called “Product Strategy”. In our case, we have multiple products (Blackship, White Rabbit Express, and OMG Japan), so we’ve created a Product Strategy Folder for each Product.
- Create an Announcements Board for each product to disseminate meeting notes and other information to the rest of the team. We group announcements by month.
Cycles and Pitches
- Create a Folder for your upcoming cycle, such as “Cycle 2”.
- In the “Cycle” folder, create a Board for Pitches. Anyone on the product team can move their shortlisted, shaped up raw ideas to the upcoming Pitches Board for consideration at the betting table.
Betting Table and Cycle Boards
- A “Voting” type column can be useful when running your betting table session.
- Create a board for each engineering team. We have two teams consisting of developer-and-designer pairs.
- After pitches are voted on at the betting table, move them to an engineering team’s Board for implementation. There you can use Groups to organize them into Scopes such as “Payment by PayPal” or “Storage notifications.”
- Unlike Basecamp, where a task can either be checked or unchecked, A Status column in Monday.com can be used to track which tasks are “New,” “In Progress,” “Blocked,” “Done,” or whatever other states you’d like to track.
Wrapping Up
We hope these ideas help you get started Shaping Up in Monday.com. As much as we think Shape Up is a brilliant methodology for improving the effectiveness of your product teams, compared to Basecamp we found Monday.com to be a much more flexible, powerful, sophisticated, and enjoyable-to-use management tool.
Ask me Anything
I’m happy to answer any questions you may have in the comments below.
