Agile

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 2012, Spotify released a video about their engineering culture. It showed autonomous “squads,” aligned into “tribes,” supported by “chapters” and “guilds.” It looked amazing. Teams working independently. No bureaucracy. Innovation everywhere. The video went viral. Suddenly, every company wanted squads and tribes. Management consultants sold “Spotify Model transformations.” Books were written. Certifications created. There was just one problem: Spotify doesn’t use the Spotify Model anymore. The model that everyone copied was a snapshot of one moment in Spotify’s history. A work in progress. An experiment. ...