Process

You’ve been doing Scrum for years. Two-week sprints. Daily standups. Story points. Sprint planning. Retrospectives. And it’s exhausting. The sprints feel arbitrary. The planning meetings drag on. The backlog is a graveyard of ideas no one will ever build. You’re shipping, but it feels like running on a treadmill. What if there’s a better way? In 2019, Basecamp published “Shape Up”—their alternative to Scrum. The core idea: Work in 6-week cycles (not 2-week sprints) Fixed time, variable scope (not fixed scope, variable time) No backlog (ideas don’t pile up forever) Betting, not planning (leadership commits to ideas worth doing) Shaping, not speccing (rough outlines, not detailed specs) It’s radically different from Scrum. ...

In 1950, Toyota was a struggling Japanese car company. American manufacturers like Ford and GM were giants. They had scale, capital, technology. Toyota had none of that. But they had something else: Kaizen. 改善 (kai = change, zen = good) Continuous improvement. Not big, dramatic changes. Not revolutionary breakthroughs. Just small improvements. Every day. By everyone. Over decades, those small improvements compounded into dominance. By 2008, Toyota became the world’s largest automaker. ...