Shape Up is a product development method that fixes time and varies scope. Teams shape a problem before committing to it, choose which pitches deserve a bet, and give builders an uninterrupted cycle to ship meaningful work.

At Process Street, moving to Shape Up helped reduce a development cycle from roughly six months to six weeks, a 75% reduction. For teams ready to ditch Scrum, Shape Up offers a different way to shorten a dev cycle. The three checklists in this guide turn the method into practical workflows for shaping, betting, and building.

Shape Up is a product development method that fixes the time and varies the scope. Teams shape a bet, commit to a six-week build cycle, and cut or adapt requirements so they can ship useful work on schedule.

At Process Street, that shift helped our engineering, product, and design team reduce a development cycle from roughly six months to six weeks. Delivering features and modernizing our tech stack via Shape Up became parts of the same bounded strategy, rather than competing imperatives. The method created room for technical modernization without putting feature delivery on indefinite hold.

Does anyone have the number for Jeff Bezos?

He owes me over $10,000.

Thanks to his 1-Click checkout, I must’ve purchased at least $10,000 worth of stuff that I didn’t need or want. He’s made it way too easy to purchase from Amazon and it’s got to stop.

So, yeah if you have his number I will…Wait… What’s that?

Bezos didn’t come up with the 1-Click checkout idea? It wasn’t his idea to make it possible to buy a Tibetan Buddhist necklace worth $169,000 in one single click?

Well, if it wasn’t entrepreneurial Bezos, the innovator and founder of Amazon and the Blue Origin spaceship, then who on earth was it?

Regular Amazon employee, programmer, and intrapreneur: Peri Hartman.

Thanks to Peri’s pioneering checkout idea and Amazon’s unwavering belief in intrapreneurship (harnessing the power of innovation from within the workplace), the 1-Click checkout gave Amazon a huge competitive advantage, re-wrote the entire book on eCommerce, and ruined my life. They also made a cool $177bn by slapping a patent on it and licensing the idea out to others.

But despite this example, many companies fail to harness the power of their existing internal innovators. Preferring instead to hire external resources to execute ground-breaking ideas, boost competitor advantage, and improve ways of working.

So, taking more intrapreneurial examples from the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Google, this Process Street post will help you understand the importance of intrapreneurship and shine a light on the hidden entrepreneurial resources that lie within your company:

• Are intrapreneurs just shy entrepreneurs waiting for their big break?
• Proof that encouraging intrapreneurship is good for business
• How to recognize intrapreneurs and nurture intrapreneurship within your organization

Ready to see what’s right in front of your nose?

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Jonathan Bond is a Process Street Staff Product Designer, Star Wars fan, and human problem solver. Reach him on Twitter @jrbond.

The path you actually take in life is often wildly different from the one you thought you’d take. I spent years undertaking a fine arts degree. However, after I graduated, I wanted to get my hands metaphorically dirty (and literally cleaner — goodbye, paint!) by going into graphic design.

Initially, I bounced between various agencies doing what you’d expect any freelance graphic designer to do: logos and websites. While it was interesting and paid the bills, there was a new buzzword on the block in 2010 that sounded even more exciting: UX.

“A user interface is like a joke.
If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.”
– Martin LeBlanc, CEO

User experience (UX) design is focused on the individual thoughts about a product or service a person might have. It takes into consideration qualitative data like the user’s emotions and attitudes towards a product, as well as the more practical elements like ease of use, efficiency, and so on.

The more I read about UX design, the more I liked what I read. I felt it fit my own design philosophy; I just connected with it. This was something I wanted to be involved in.

As luck would have it, a company that wanted someone to improve their app’s aesthetic hired me to be involved with that. I still didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I kept reading and studying, and ten years later, I’m still doing that – now at Process Street.

This post will cover:

• Product design at Process Street
• The details make the (UX) design
• You are not your user

Let’s begin!
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