Basecamp's Shape Up: The Alternative to Scrum You've Been Looking For

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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:

It’s radically different from Scrum.

The Ikea Effect: Why We Overvalue Things We Build

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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:

But I couldn’t see that. All I could see was MY framework, MY design decisions, MY time invested.