Three moves. Shaping: before anything is scheduled, someone senior turns a raw idea into a pitch — the problem, the appetite (how much time it is worth, decided first), a rough solution at the level of a sketch, and the rabbit holes named so the team does not fall into them. Betting: a small group reads the pitches and bets a six-week cycle on a few; there is no backlog, and what is not bet on is let go and can be re-pitched. Building: a team of two or three owns the whole slice, maps the scopes as it discovers them, and charts each one up a hill — the left side is figuring out, the right side is doing — so a stuck scope is visible as a dot that has stopped climbing.
The idea worth taking even without the rest is the appetite: a deadline is a fact about the calendar, an estimate is a guess about the work, and an appetite is a decision about how much the thing is worth. Fix that and the scope has to flex, which is the point. The six-week cycle, the two-week cooldown after it, and the no-backlog rule are the company-shaped parts; the shaping and the hill chart travel anywhere.
The sequel, in spirit, to Getting Real. Free at basecamp.com/shapeup, with a printed edition.