Shape Up vs Rough

If you're not using Shape Up, or don't know what it is, check out Basecamp's free ebook. In this article, we will go over how Rough and Shape Up complement each other, and where they differ.

Stop Sprinting

Shape up is a great way to try a new style of product development without having to come up with a custom process. We recommend any product teams that aren't enjoying scrum to give it a try.

Shaping

In Shape Up, you shape a pitch to prepare for betting. Shaping is a fantastic concept. It defines a clear phase between ideation and development. Both Rough and Shape Up embrace this stage, with some minor differences.

Opening Doors

In Shape Up, you prepare your pitch in private. You can bring someone else in for advice but pitching is mainly an individual endeavor. Rough has the opposite approach. Ideas and pitches are completely transparent. We believe the most important part of feature development is building alignment, which is hard to do behind closed doors.

Agree on the problem

You'll notice when you create a Pitch in Rough, the only detail you need to fill out is the Problem. Building something great is extremely difficult if your team doesn't agree on the problem you're trying to solve. Individually, it's easy to convince yourself that a problem is bigger than it really is. Sometimes it takes someone from another team to weigh in with their perspective before you truly understand all the elements of a problem. So, define your problem and get agreement.

Accept the Idea

Shaping is a time consuming process. Once you've agreed on a set of problems to solve, teams have to decide which ones to invest time into. This is another reason we believe in transparency. Different team members weigh different problems higher than others and they should have an opportunity to give their perspective.

Fill out the rest: Appetite, Fat Markers, Breadboarding

These three concepts are fantastic. We strongly believe every proposal should have a Fat Marker sketch at minimum. You can use our whiteboards for this.

No Gos and Rabbit holes = Out of Scope

We've found that in reality, teams talk mainly about what is in scope and out of scope. We don't hold any strong opinions about No Gos or Rabbit holes, but we don't believe in enforcing these concepts either. As long as you're talking about scope, you'll probably be fine.

The Betting Table

Rough doesn't embrace the betting table concept. We put a focus on getting your pitches shaped instead of how you prioritize them. You can have a betting meeting, keep the shaped features in order, or plan week by week. That said, we do encourage teams to keep their list of shaped pitches small. If it's been at the bottom of the list for too long, get rid of it.

Cycles vs Sprints

Rough doesn't enforce any sort of time-box to your feature development. We know that companies at different stages have different requirements for their development time. Even within the context of Shape Up, pitches can have an appetite of 2-6 weeks. We will tell you what work was done within what timeframe, but it's up to you to determine what that means to your business.

Cooldown

Cooldown gives you a chance to tidy up all of those things that never get prioritized but still need to be done. We love this concept and while we don't enforce it through Rough, we will track commits done across all of your features so you can see which ones are getting the most attention during cooldown.

Development

Rough leaves it up to you to decide your development process. Rough does subscribe to the Shape Up philosophy of "Done Means Deployed" which is why we only track commits to the main branch against progress.

Post-Development

Rough puts more of a focus on post-development activities than Shape Up does. Too often employees at companies feel disconnected from the impact of their work. Developers work on a feature for a quarter then never hear anything once it's launched; Designers pour their heart and soul into a gorgeous interface only to have it never hit production; Sales finally see a killer feature land only to have their prospects react coldly to it.

There are other tools that track usage metrics, and more that capture customer conversations. We aren't looking to replace any of these tools, but we are looking to centralize this information. The place you propose your great idea is the same place you come back in a year and see how it landed with your customers.

Rough's post-development workflow is still being shaped. While Rough is in alpha we're focusing on the earlier stages of product development but feel free to get in touch about your experience with this stage.