Product-Development

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. ...

I once spent three weeks building a custom CSS framework. It had exactly the features I wanted. Perfect naming conventions. Elegant utility classes. Beautiful documentation. I showed it to my team. They said, “Why not just use Tailwind?” My response? “Because mine is better.” Was it actually better? No. Objectively, Tailwind had: More features Better documentation Larger community More battle-testing Active maintenance But I couldn’t see that. All I could see was MY framework, MY design decisions, MY time invested. ...