Hey Ryan. Hey Chris. It's been a while. It's been a long time. Lots of tweets asking about where we've been and now here we are. We made it two episodes in. Yeah. I think that was my prediction. Yeah. Yeah. Two. One is one is one and two is a series. Yeah. The second season. It was just a bit of a delay in between. And so, but it's been fun. You know, I feel like every time we've been to workshop
or conferences that we have somebody come up and say, Hey, when you're going to do some more demand thinking, nothing was awesome. And we were we were joking about it. You know, we're looking back at the recordings and we were calling it Wainsworld because it was so kind of like improv and amateur, you know, but when you have new stuff to talk about, you don't know how to talk about it. You just turn the camera on and you start right.
Yeah. It's just it's just call each other and hit the record button. And anytime we don't hit the record button, I'm always like, we talked for an hour and a half. I'm like, why didn't we just record that just would have been an episode. So I'm glad that we decided to do this.
So we got through two episodes and we were trying to talk and I think partially successful talking about how to how to think in a deeper way about what's the right work and how to, you know, take something like a raw idea or a feature request and and try and dig dig into into what the demand actually is like what what's actually meaningful about the idea and how do we turn that into into deciding what to build.
And we have a lot more language for that now. We I felt pretty stuck actually after that second episode because we were getting from people is like, hey, this is all cool and everything. But how do I use it? Like, how do I, I don't have time. You're telling me that I need to like dig deeper and unpack things, but like, I don't have I don't have more hours in my day to do this and and even if I do unpack it like where.
Where did where does this work go and and and how does it turn into a project. It felt like there was a lot of sort of like like, I can all sounds good. But how do I actually put it into practice. Yeah, and I actually felt that way personally too, right. So there's no doubt that a useful tool is created.
But all the questions were when do I pick this thing up. One should I be doing this every day is this one. So and I so I got comparative jobs, right. I know when I have a strategic decision to make, I'm going to go deep and I'm going to interview some people and and and figure out what the struggle is and go go execute on it.
With demand thinking we had the tool right we're going to walk back the timeline and in a for a feature request and sort of figure that out for a bug. But it was the same. It's like, I don't I don't know. I'm not going to do every bug request. I'm not sure how to filter, you know, for the important ones. So it's like the the trigger. There were sort of still gaps right and the triggers weren't completely clear as to when to reach for it.
Totally. And then it worked out that Jason pulled me aside and suggested that I write this book for base camp shape up. And it just turns out that there's the content of shape up basically articulates exactly what I felt was blocking us.
How do we talk about now we know we we have the word shaping the work right and and and how do we turn shape work into a project and and what does it mean to shape the work. And now I feel like we kind of have this this framework around it where now we can think of what we were talking about before. As like you said, like walking back the timeline and trying to do the demand thinking to unpack what feature request is really about now we can understand that as like an input to shape.
Yeah, and the timing was fascinating too, right. So I just as an update. I'm at a company called auto books right now sort of running parts of product and a growth team and you know it's a startup so that the roles are always hard to define. But it was great timing in terms of you figuring out what the content of that book was going to be and and basically going through the process of saying how do I express the things that we do at base camp which is somewhat of a of a unique company.
And then me saying, hey, I've got this sandbox of like a extremely fluid startup that's willing to try new things and clearly has some engineering challenges that we want to overcome right. So it was almost like as you're writing the content I'm pulling pieces of it and applying it and we've got a nice feedback loop. So that it was a very fun process. I don't know how long has this been going on six, eight months probably since this whole thing started at least.
And it was good because we kind of actually prototyped a lot of the shape up material together. You came to Chicago. We did some breadboarding for some auto books features. And then when it was time for me to write the book. I went back I went out to Detroit and we covered at least one or two of your whiteboard walls at auto books with with you know system sketches of how all the all the steps of the process fit together. So it was pretty fun to work on that together.
And now we're kind of surfacing again with with that work behind us and we have a lot more stuff in our toolbox to to to to create the context around what we were trying to talk about with the man thinking. And I think that maybe brings us to something that you and I were talking about last week.
We're trying to figure out where to pick this up again and been hearing I heard the same story from you and from another team actually a team from a from a from a from a pretty big company who's adopting shape up. And we're trying to figure out what how to how to put language around this this this terrible meeting that happens that is painful for everybody that we're calling the slap dash meeting.
And this is like where some some steps of the shaping didn't happen. And then and and and and what is so painful about this meeting and and what's going on there and then how how it's changed for you and and some of the stories we're hearing about what it looks like. If we do if we do some of these shaping and de risking steps before we get to that meeting. So can you tell me a little bit about like what's what was this slap dash meeting thing about.
Yeah, it's so it's funny. So the last time we talked you remember you actually like opened your phone and you said there's this text message from somebody that I've been talking to you like I got I got to find it.
And when you read the text and they described the meeting the contrast that came out was incredible right because at all books we've been doing we've been doing the shape up work we've been doing the vetting table that the teams are working in six week cycles like there's there's value being created that the team is really really happy with it like we're on the we're on the good side of this thing.
And when you read that text it took me way back in time and I was thinking oh my god you almost don't recognize the contrast. Somebody puts it in front of you and I said I know like let me tell you about that meeting. I'll tell you exactly what happens right.
So the one of the examples from way back that I can remember is like we had a we had an application that we had built in the app. I'll try to be as concrete as possible. So like in the application there's a list of of users that gets generated right.
And you can click as a user in and see all the users in the application and at some point we had we had done a contract with a customer and they they basically said like we're going to use the heck out of this and like it's it's a little bit slow is there anything you just speed it up because like it's kind of contingent on one of our use cases and we never heard anything from any other any other customers about that that feature.
So we basically huddled into a room we had a product manager I got pulled in right because I'm supposed to be the customer person and they're all looking at me and I said look this is like a buried feature I can't I can't tell you how it relates to a job I can't I can't tell you anything super useful somebody's not saying make it faster so I'm like I can ride along for these meetings but I don't really know what what to tell you in terms of trade offs.
And the way that the form worked at the time was that we were doing a service I call we're building sort of all of the data returning all the data and then we had search and filter that was all happening on the client side right so you can see like you have tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of users it's going to take a little bit of time to return that that data set and that's what this customer was really really concerned about.
So we met for a half an hour and everybody kind of threw up their shoulders I had no input the product manager who had built that list gave like a very reasonable product answer like we needed a list I can't tell you the wise and all the trade offs like we just sort of built this thing so it's hard to make decisions and trade us about what to do next.
So we basically left the meeting and one of the engineers said I'll go like figure out some solutions right so they went off we came back two weeks later and we were staring at a document that the engineer had built we had another 30 minutes on our calendar so this is like couple product manager or CTO analyst people like that sitting in the in the meeting how many people are in the room. One two three four five I think seven or eight. Wow. Okay so more than five. Yeah.
Comfort stable TV right like you're going to like I'm going to walk you through the thing right so it's one of the situations where they had a so they actually came back with the solution saying we're going to do a server side filter on company right so like you're going to build the list and there's a lot of work going on.
So I know the list and that there's a company after with every user is kind of a multi tenet sass thing so like you pick your company and then I'm going to return that data set and then all the other filters that we had search and creation date and all that so is going to act on that data set that's now in the browser right and it took like so 25 minutes into the meeting we're looking at the mock up and like I think everybody is kind of trying to understand.
I pick a company it's going to return this and then I'm going to do some other things but do I think that the client side filtering is acting on the entire data set or is it very clear that the company filter is sort of one level up from these other search fields and constraints and things like that and the UX people were kind of confused and we're all kind of confused and the engineer was doing his best to say like I think this is clear like we can we can actually pull this off 25 minutes in we're all kind of scratching our heads.
And the thing that you feel is like you spiral back to like different like it's there a totally different way to solve this what if we were to do it all on the server side like the conversation goes out right because people are having a hard time understanding exactly what's being presented and all of the little interactions and how they would work.
And to like when you get that feeling you're like let's just put this whole thing like what if we put a last search in and it's like I got three minutes left do we want to we talk about it now or do we and and then what what happened and I think a lot of times what what happens is like you get the decision maker right so the CTO steps in and just says we got two minutes left this is kind of ship in three weeks on making this decision and and let's go and then like you feel two things like one.
We did a good job right like we plow through problems and we tackle difficult things and then you leave that meeting and it's you realize we didn't we didn't solve anything permanently this is going to come back and bite us because we really didn't talk all that much about the user we talked about the shortcomings what we thought our solution was but we really don't want no what's going on we're patching something to satisfy one customer which is probably going to upset other customers and we got to this point where we're just like head to rush something over the finish line and and make a decision.
I want to take one thing you said you said the the conversation goes out so and and you're kind of gesturing with your hands like like the conversation goes out meaning like like what what's what's out.
So here's the thing I think you can only talk about that in terms like once you've seen a very like well bounded project on the table right you because before I use shape up I didn't understand what it meant it was like brainstorming right like what if we put a last search on there what if we added pagination what if we but the problem is is the intent of the meeting is to be narrowing in on a solution to
a problem and what you're doing is like introducing solutions that are all over the map right you were like we don't really know we we know that we need this to load fast but aside from that we don't know anything about any of the other trade-offs that we need to make is the company as a primary filter like is that actually logical do we need creation date as a secondary filter we need to order this by first and so so you've got like you've got a group of people under the table.
So we're going to be able to make a group of people under a really tight time box like 30 minutes who are supposed to be making a decision about something and it's kind of like now or never like we're supposed to make a call and get and move forward on this project and not only are there unknowns but but you're the extra the number of unknowns is actually increasing during this time because people are saying but what about this and what about that and what maybe this and maybe that and so instead of
of problems to solve it's almost like you're you're expanding the universe of things that you might do but then it's becoming a bigger and bigger conversation but the clock is ticking down you have less and less time.
That's it and you're the one of the problems is like you're it's okay to have those kinds of conversations I don't think you get very far posing different solutions without really understanding it's understanding the problem but under the under the gun of 30 minutes we need to have a decision. We need to have a decision we need to push through this it just can't can't happen.
So a friend of mine was talking about a similar meeting he had he he says two weeks ago we're in a grooming session and so they're trying to figure out you know what goes into what goes into a sprint and
there were some some stories that that he had defined just with words you know like it's got to do this and that and this and the designer took that and turned it into designs the designer hands the designs back and now they walk into a room with engineers and they're going to have a meeting about you know how do we make this happen right and it's the same thing it's a short meeting.
There's not a lot of time to actually do the problem solving there's too many people in the room and now what's happening is there's a lot of debate about the about the work like are we going to do it like this or like that is it like this well maybe that's not the right thing maybe it should be this instead and it's like the quote the quote I have from him was it was painful.
What's what's what's what's tell me about that like what's it's just a meeting you're just talking about some work like what's painful. You I think very quickly like if you're in a 30 minute meeting it feels like 15 10 to 15 minutes and you know that you're never going to be able to do something well. I think that's that's the worst pain right it's like we're we're going to we need to get work is being imposed on us we have very little information.
We're not sure where to go the it's like a ticking time bomb and it's like the worst of of evils and or the least of evils and nobody I don't know anybody who likes to like anybody in the creative product space who likes to work on those conditions right nothing that's going to delight a user is going to come out of that sort of that sort of meeting.
It's just it's exhausting and painful so what's so so that's sort of the before picture what's what what are you doing now and and how's that different.
Yeah so so so one thing that I'll say I guess talking about the before picture is that like I want I don't want to race to a solution right but one of the things that I did is I came out of that meeting you know back in it and I I talked to the engineer just grabbed a coffee like you would come up with this mockup you know he clearly wasn't happy about it because it's not like anybody bought into it in the in the meeting so I said like how did you get to that point right how did you get to a point where you were pitching that mockup in this meeting with eight people and a half an hour.
To discuss it right and he was telling me the story like I and you know I don't want to he's not sure thing responsibility he's not but he's like I don't know any of the constraints I don't know the customer I just like I had 30 minutes I put a customer filter customer
filter on the top that was server side and I thought I would have solved the solve the problem right and and so the the issue that I see is that like if we take all of our ideas right and we plant them as seeds and say let's do 30 minute meetings and let an engineer work on them for 30 minutes and see what they come up with you end up with people sort of frantically running from one box to the next checking off checking off boxes right and like one of the worst
things that can happen is one of them slips through the cracks and gets built on the other end because there hasn't been much much thought put into it. The thing that I want to highlight is that we never needed to have either one of those meetings and we never needed to ask that engineer to spend 30 minutes on this problem.
If we would have actually taken the time to go upstream look at the contract talk to the customer sort of figure out the totality of the whole thing and keep in mind the capacity that we have to actually work on things and ship quality features and improvements to our product we probably could have checked this box in silence to the rest of the team and just said let's not worry about this we're going to deprioritize this and prioritize the things that the things that matter.
So there's there's there's kind of a shallow work being done up front with not a lot of time and then and then when it starts to get real and there's a group of people actually really thinking about well what's the next step what do we put in the sprinter whatever.
Yeah there starts to be some deeper thinking but now there's there's there's not enough preparation there's not enough information in the room people don't actually have the answers to the questions that are being raised and a decision has to be made now.
And like we're all here so what are we going to do and then a call gets made and then there's this feeling like you're committing to something you don't understand that you can feel is like Swiss cheese and and but but now you got to go and and that's kind of this like painful feeling. It's a whole yeah nothing good is ever going to come out of that right. It's the best case you get lucky worst case it's a total disaster I guess.
So the contrast to this is going to be then what more there's got to be different kind of work that happens before you get into the room right. Yeah well the the kind the reason I haven't felt this or experience this in a long time is because of doing the shape of work right so at auto books we've done a number of projects now all of this is cemented in in jobs which you can do a lot of shape up without jobs we're not going to go far down that that rabbit hole.
But we we have a lot of conviction when it comes to our product decisions and the things we want to build so the first the first thing that we build was called the payment form very briefly auto books provides a basically a simple invoicing and payment system to small businesses and we deliver it through through banks so you you log into your online banking your bank account you see your account balance you see bill pay.
Now you see auto books and you can click there create an invoice get paid things like things like that and what one of the things that we learned through through the jobs interviews was that people were hacking our system.
In order to receive credit card payments so they weren't an invoicing sort of business but they realize that if they sent an invoice via email person could click that email and arrive at a page where they put in their credit card information to pay the invoice we did a bunch of jobs interviews why do you adopt auto books why did you switch and a lot of people say like I do this walk you thing with your invoicing system like I've got my extremely high uncomplicated invoicing system that connects to inventory management and all these other systems I can't get ready.
But I wanted to be able to accept payments right into my bank account so I do this thing where I send out my real invoice then I sort of send out a fake invoice and tell them to click that button to pay online it's like this one and we heard it over and over and over again right.
So the thing that we did differently was basically take all of that and go through the breadboarding process and say we know that this struggle to exist it's not a great user experience to have to create an invoice just to accept the credit card payment for a customer.
So what is the most lightweight thing that we could ship inside of of six weeks to be able to to address this this concern and you run the room how many people how many people are in the room when you're doing this this isn't this isn't eight people anymore you don't have the CTO in the room this time right it's a different group.
Yeah this this is a different group so this is this is two people right so this is me and a kind of call him like a front-end engineer basically who are all steeped in the insight right so we had been through everyone in the interviews we knew him top to bottom so we understood the customer and we had the shorthand language like we we were at the same level of knowledge in terms of our knowledge of auto books or knowledge of the customer our knowledge of the product.
And this is I think what you explain in the book of like a room with whiteboards in it and moving incredibly fast like drawing out of breadboard crossing a couple things off at the same time he's on this is Jordan who runs growth at auto books he's on another whiteboard sort of drawing it out and it's but the difference is it's not going out it's like it's it's cornering the problem like every iteration he and I aren't arguing like I think this is better I think that it's like I've done a breadboard
and I've encountered a problem and then he's like sort of tracking down that with the next next version and like has a has a solution to that. So you've got two people you got two people in the room and the doors closed and and you you both have a lot of background knowledge that you're bringing to the same problem.
So you have a you're not you're not like struggling to catch each other up like you're kind of starting from the same point together like we know the same thing how do we come up with a solution for this. And you you mentioned that it's not going out that you're kind of trying to corner the problem. I know that feeling there's this feeling of like we're going to close the door and I don't know when we're going to come out again it might be a couple hours.
You know it might be that kind of thing we're like you're you're you're jamming on the whiteboard until you both notice that your way overdue for lunch and you're like exhausted or something you know it can be that kind of. But there's this feeling of like we are going to wrestle it down like we're going to we're going to corner the problem we're going to wrestle it down we're going to sort of like get to the point where this thing makes sense.
And we don't have that that feeling of like what about that what about that so one thing I'm trying to like how to say it exactly so I think you I think you're on to something where it's like when I contrast it to years before we had time to work which is the biggest thing if there's no prioritization happening at the high level.
If I didn't have the insight to say Jordan I think this is a thing and for him who's also like kind of in charge of product strategy right to say like yeah let's let's drain this.
We are not free to lock that door and work through launch right we're literally looking at the spreadsheet of the 200 feature requests bug requests everything going like what do you think about the first one oh we could ship a little fix here what do you think about the second one oh let's have this person working on and it's boom boom boom boom boom.
The feeling that that you get in the room with the other person that has the same knowledge only comes when you can lock the door and say like we're going to work this as long as it takes and it's not always ideal sometimes you have two hours you see let's come back tomorrow and let's let's keep going but there's no like it's different than you know it's it's to a clock now let's have something by 245 so we can document it and be out of the room by three right it's just yeah.
And you mentioned that it's not going out in the sense that it's it's not spiraling out of control but in a way when I think about times where I've been in the room do and I think of this as like the shaping room you know I mean there's a lot of steps to shaping but this is kind of like the defining moment of shaping right and so we're we're not we're not like on a computer creating anything we're on the whiteboard and we're we're not even really drawing very carefully like this is the this the button goes to the right.
And so this is the this the button goes here on top of this in the sidebar it's a bit more like breadboard like we're going to get from here to here to here to here to here and these are the connections and but where does that belong when we could put it on this screen when we get from that screen to this screen yeah but but we have to go here first probably like so it's all about the connection between things but there is a sense of you are kind of going out in a way that you you might you might go down a false you might have a false start and be like oh you know what like I'm going to do that.
Oh you know what like we can't we shouldn't set up the payment form from here it's got to be pre configured when you start your account so there's got like what what what if there was a button on the dashboard and then you you do a new breadboard and it like starts on the dashboard and there's like a you know see my view my payment link and it's already set up for you or whatever right and now you're sketching a new flow there's a sense of like when you're down to only the two people and you have the same background information and you're kind of sealed.
You're kind of sealed in your you know like shaping chamber together you know the doors closed like you have actually a little bit more latitude to be like well what about this what about that I feel like it's actually more like the right time to do that kind of jumping around.
I think that's right yeah it's interesting because it's like it's we talk about long periods of time but the other thing that I'm thinking about is it still feels very very fast not not fast in terms of like we arrive at a solution in 25 minutes but fast in terms of we have so much shared knowledge we can quickly highlight a problem have a really good understanding of like what that is like what you said right we can't set it up here because there's too much friction in there and we know from the story that that's not going to work.
Because they're going to go back to their old way of getting paid if you know what I mean so you can jump into that and sort of bounce around solutions you know that you're not at the level of UI affordances having to argue over like is this on the left or the right and you know that you're not in a group that so big we're like eight people just heard that problem and they're all off like well if we implement it's elastics like we we know we're throwing tons and tons of different ideas that we have to sift through.
There's still something about that number two it can't be one I'm convinced of that like doing this alone is very very difficult. I think you can do three I think more than three you're done. So it's not it's not it's not necessarily that you always have the answer and you're not you're not going out to unknowns it's more that you are you're kind of constantly converging so like even if you diverge for a second of like wait a minute maybe that should be over here.
And you start sketching a new breadboard you're kind of already back together converging on the new idea instantly like we talk about the kind of the shaping room euphoria you know that feeling of like oh what about this. Oh yeah that's going to be no no no oh shit oh wait a minute oh this will work you know like you're you're moving really fast and you are entertaining alternatives.
But you're not in this place where like you're sitting there with a concept that's supposed to work and four different things are wrong about it and you're all kind of like deflated like but what about this but what about that like. The energy isn't isn't dispersing and spreading out into all directions it's always kind of converging on to the on to the new thing that you're sketching like right now.
Yeah I think you use the word euphoria that's exactly like I snapped a picture from I think Tuesday of Jordan drawing on the whiteboard at Hothel Books and that's like that was the exact feeling I mean we are on to something we are moving incredibly quickly towards a solution we know because we've done our research that customers are going to be delighted about this.
And the great contrast is that we were just working on a project like a month ago and we did hit that like brick wall where we probably had 40 hours three of us into shaping this idea and we're like really excited about what we were about to hand to a group of engineers and designers and Jordan called out like we forgot this one thing and it like.
There's no arguing that brings you down right like home like because there's that moment like is this whole thing on gravel on the on the back of this but but having the shared understanding of the problem having the time to work it out it's like you can quickly regroup and say like lean in. Put our heads together like we might have to rebredboard this whole thing but it's like we can we can we can solve this and it's it's an incredibly different feeling.
Then running into that roadblock and just I keep using out like and then it's like no we have to throw this whole thing away what if we were to do it all on the client side like some of these crazy like not you take you suddenly take a right turn but then that right turn like you don't actually go deep down and and and and and and and and rest let down and corner it and and shape it into a really specific idea that you feel good about it's like you just take a right turn and you're like well let's just do it on client side and you're like fine it'll work out let's just do it.
And then you have this like crazy feeling in your stomach like we just we just committed to a new idea but we didn't actually wrestle it down enough to to be sure about about what it is.
Yeah we're pretty sure that all the trade-offs and decisions that we made up to this point are going to like translate but we're not going to go through I just think that's like unacceptable in terms of shape shaping work right you can't you can't end that way like and then this fundamental thing changes but it should all be all right.
Totally right so on a contrast this so we get you get out of you get to the point where the two of you are jamming in a room you you you arrive at a point where you think you have a concept that is is worth pursuing.
But so far you know you haven't had necessarily deeply knowledgeable back end people in the room you haven't maybe had somebody who understands all the implications of how this has to integrate to other systems or or whatever right so there's this you've done the shaping work but in a way this is still kind of preliminary.
So you can go straight from that shaping room shaping session to to going into the room with the eight people and then figuring out how to schedule the engineers or is there a step in between. Yeah I think I kind of learned this the hard way.
I think I did the eight person thing and recently the way I do it is groups of twos and they're not incredibly well well designed I'll choose like a senior architect and a middle of a front 100 person like somebody that I think has domain knowledge of one of one of
working on and there's two things happening one is I'm using it to to to de risk and to it's an opportunity for me to tell the whole pitch end to end and like get good at telling that story and hearing myself tell it and seeing if I can find holes in any of it.
But basically I think back to the question you asked like it's me and whoever did the shaping with two people who have the deep experience and I think this is very important basically starting with an empty whiteboard and in most cases drawing the breadboard and saying here's the first view it's going to lead to this this is going to happen and and and basically having it.
I call it like walking them down the down the path as opposed to like just presenting it to them in a you know power point or whatever that's that's that's pre made. So you don't have a document yet you're you're you're you're not at the point where this is baked enough that you have like a presentation or a document you're you've done the shaping work.
Now you're in a room with one or two technical people that have some certain kind of expertise that they're going to push back on you or or help you understand things that you don't you missed or don't understand. And and you're not you're not showing them a document you're actually kind of walking them through the shaped concept like you've almost like got it memorized and you're and you're drawing it out like on the whiteboard in front of them.
That's exactly it we can actually get a little bit tech to hear the in terms of base camp we start all of these with a base camp message. Where whoever is doing the shaping like a lot of times it's me out kick off the message and I'll say here this the stats around the problem you know 23% of the people that use this feature churn you know from auto box here like I think this is important here's what I know so far here's some interview recordings things like that.
You know will you guys spend some time on this with me we use that thread every time we get together and whiteboard and we're snapping pictures reporting thing in there usually it's like hey go find out this other statistic or talk to this user and we're using that to build it up.
So at the point where I'm going into the room with people to de risk that's all I have is like this long running thread and at the bottom of it there are typically a handful of really tight breadboards right like because it's arrived at that point but you've got to say that you've built up some domain knowledge you've built up some understanding about the problem is there a bunch of things that we know and then here is the solution but it does solution is just limited to some really raw breadboard sketches.
That's it and so like everything leading up to the breadboards is the story. So this is the this is the the great part about the de risking is you get the people in the room you can draw draw the whole the whole breadboard they can see how the whole thing flows.
Two things happen is like you should have most of the time when I find is like I've got answers for about 80% of the things. What about when this happens because I've heard that before it's either like that's incredibly rare and it's an edge case or let me walk you through this part of the breadboard because it's actually captured here right but you have answers at your fingertips or you're lighting up because the person is giving you an incredible piece of knowledge like I did not realize the system worked that way.
And like I've got to go you know like I can go rework it and rethink it. The other the other amazing thing that happens is like the I don't know I don't have words for it like the questions are are on point like you're not getting the elastic search question like you know you can do this whole thing
when so it's like in this little place I'm not sure when you make that call that you're going to get this value back that's going to let you pop like that button so you can get to the next page it's like you have a lot of it's it's almost like there's there's this context because so much of the solution is baked and then there's this kind of like unbaked or half baked little hole in it here there.
And then when you're talking about that one question it's like you have you have so many kind of specific things that are already solved around it that it's easier to like you fill that in and you can move on like how is that different then then somebody raising a concern in the in the slap dash meeting with eight people how's that different.
I think that the contrast comes because you know so much more about what you're trying to accomplish how you're going to accomplish it and the reason that you're you're solving this problem is because you spent more time in that room with the with the the the two person session doing the shaping like you've thought deeper about the about the solution.
I think it's both I think you you you if you get to a place where you can do shaping well and you're making trade-offs and you're able to like do the design it also means that you have a pretty good idea of your insight and the problem that you're solving. And I think both those things combine to create a presentation where people can actually ask you ask you ask you really pointed questions and you can have pointed answers without like sort of spiral you know spiraling out or or or.
Being challenged in a way where you're saying like ever thought of that like not not sure how that how that would work so do I have it right it sounds like. From the sort of product person standpoint like you're the one who is trying to make this feature you're trying to figure out what this feature is and you're trying to make this feature happen.
You start off with a certain amount of of digging that you have to do into what's the problem what's the data telling us or what are the customer interviews telling us like there's some kind of an understanding about what the struggle is and what progress looks like that you're going to turn into some sort of a design solution.
You get in the room you do that you get in the shaping room and you do the shaping work to to breadboard it out and make some basic tradeoffs and like this is this is what we think is a viable approach. For this is a feature that fits our appetite that is going to do what we want to do.
And when you when you get into what what you've been calling the the de risking conversations you've got this shaped work and because you sort of did the demand thinking leading up to it you have good questions about like well why why don't we also have a sort of option over here and you're like well we don't really need it because what the customer is trying to do is this and not that.
So you're you're able to make those tradeoffs in terms of what matters and what doesn't matter but but you're learning at the same time in these de risking sessions about what's technically possible or what did you not know about how this actually has to wire together. So I'll give you two concrete examples so so one when we did the payment form to two questions that I'm recalling that came up are our are co founder who's like knows the system better than anyone in the world.
One of the places he went was so we're creating a unique URL called the payment form that every SM small business that uses autoblux they're going to get a one link that they can share with their customers. And we had done the research and and he had connected dot when he heard the pitch that we were going to create some mechanism for them to send this.
So he's like how do you how do you text it how do you email it how to and like we like we leaned on the insights right and it was very it wasn't a challenge. Everything but he's like how are we going to build all this I said it's totally out of scope like they know how to get an invoice to their customer today. They know how to text message them it's not it's not that big of a deal and it was like boom he's back into into the fold.
So we got past that like all this and the other thing about like when you have the problem bound people are excited like right because it's like we can ship this thing a lot faster we don't need to build that and you know the customer. So you know we don't have to build that and we're still going to be successful it's like that's a great answer to that close on I have to interrupt because you use such good language you said so first of all you said.
When when when he asked about well how are we going to send the link to the to our customers customer you're saying that's out that's out of scope. And then and then and then a few moments later he said you know when we have the problem bound.
So this notion of in nobody if you didn't if you if you've only done shallow prep and and you get into the room and then somebody says well what about how are we going to send the how are we going to send the link to the customer then like three hands go up and one person says we'll build an SMS thing that sends it another person says we're going to build an email
and now notify or that sends it another person says we'll do a push notification through the app and and and then before you know it you're talking about all this added scope because everybody's like throwing out ideas and nobody has. I don't know exactly how to say this but there's a certain kind of backbone and firmness that you get from doing the prep where you're able to say no that doesn't matter what this is really about is the mechanism for receiving the payment.
As long as this person already knows how to how to text message a URL or whatever so as long as we can copy and paste the URL to the to the to the payment form this is all going to be fine we don't need to worry about that like but you you're not going to be prepared to to make that
to set that boundary unless unless you've you've actually kind of built up that confidence by doing sort of that that you know Bob calls it he's called it forging before to emphasize kind of how much heat and energy and intensity there is in the thinking that leads up to that like you've done that forging work of of what's is actually about and what matters and what doesn't matter so that you can set those boundaries.
And then and then now I think we're kind of connecting it back to you're talking about spiraling out that's a beautiful example of like not spiraling saying no that's out of scope.
That's that's exactly it I think you have a you have a base camp term for this one of the things that I'm adamant about is is like everything is complex so like the second you get into a situation like the payment form and an engineer just says like oh I've done the Twilio integration before like we could just slap that on there they get some the SMS like I'm not going to do that.
Like I'm just adamant about we have so many decisions to make just based on the scope that we're presenting that you wanting to add things to it it's it's like it's all unseen complexity right and when we just need to keep our arms on it and I think when you know the insight it's the only way to push back against that because it but mom and I was joke everything is just better be better if you do a tax to be better if you said only male how do you argue against better like yeah let's ship all this stuff.
It's going to be the best product in the world. Yeah. Yeah, but so there seems to be this thing where when when you have a tiny tiny group with a lot of shared context in the room you can make trade-offs and when you have a big group this is just the committee meeting thing right every time you get a committee what happens.
You have to say yes to everything or you have to put everything on to some kind of a ice box or parking lot because you can't agree to say no to it yeah right so it's like the bigger the group the more it is kind of like yes yes yes yes yes because you you you don't have enough shared context and it's too hard to get the depth together to to actually make trade-offs and say no to certain things.
That's that's exactly it. So I'll give you go ahead let me give you my second example because so so the first one was was from Aaron right like let's talk about how we're going to address this. No, it's not a scope we're free like there's a delay in the room right like we're going to nail this like we don't have to worry about any of that.
This is going to be incredible. The second one one of our chief chief architects came out and was like well you know when you get paid you create a credit on the customer's account.
And like you're going to do some so if I send you an invoice for a hundred dollars and then I do some work for you on the side and use my payment form to pay me a hundred dollars when you open that invoice that's unrelated they're you're going to have a zero dollar balance like there's not going to be anything to pay.
So like they're now this is example like now we're in the pleniness right that's something like we're Jordan I our eyes were lighting up like yes like we didn't know that we don't have the inter-cities of accounting to the level that these people do and like but it's right there dead.
They're dead center and we were able to quickly work through she had a like let me think about this for a second well if we do this we try to do another like she can she can figure the whole thing out and we we come out of it with a tighter scope not a not a bigger scope. That's beautiful that's that that that makes me think of another barbism which is like the way to solve a problem you to wait the way to solve an unknown is to surround it with knowns.
Yes. So it's like you've got so much that you understand about what to do and then this new unknown comes up but like you can triangulate around it to figure out what to do. Yeah I think that's right. That's cool. Go away to think about it. So I cut you off to give you the other yeah so we've got kind of these.
The the the the after is starting to get clearer so we've got the the shaping work that happens with the two people in the room. And then and then this corresponds to chapter four in the book called find elements. This is where we talk about like moving quickly in front of the breadboard together and fat marker sketches and stuff like that.
And then that's a shaping room and then you've been talking about these de risking sections and and we don't I mean I think I think we made this one part of the book that uses the term de risk but the this is basically chapter five risks and rabbit holes.
And and it's this notion of I've we've got it figured out enough that we're now going to have another again small session where we're going to build up a lot of context together but this time instead of like you know whatever the product person and a designer or two designers sketching on a whiteboard together we've got somebody who's really deeply technical that we're sharing the concept with and it's almost kind of conspiratorial it's like hey this isn't.
You know this isn't up on the wall anywhere this isn't like the thing that we're all doing next it's like we're working on this thing and what do you think right and let me walk you through it. And the freedom that like I the contrast is like I'm not asking you how long it's going to take I'm not asking you if you can do it by November on that like you have to caveat because we're all still working this other way it's like.
And then like the first time you have to caveat now like I walk around the office I'm like can I grab an eye your time they're like yeah no big deal like they know I'm not going to pin them to the wall or something right and you're not papers shredding you're not like let's turn this into a whole bunch of tasks that are going to go into some kind of a sprint you're not you're not actually turning this into work you're you're looking at the work to figure out what the work is still.
But I think we're we're going to be taking a little bit but but that's the interesting thing is that there's a culture change that that we've gone through at auto books and and I think everybody's going to have to go through if they want to adopt shape up is that this is the work.
Like I there were like I pull an engineer in and I'm like let's can we just focus on this for three hours and like do some whiteboards and it was like I got I've got a lot of work to do it's like I'm saying like this is the future of our product like this is the thing. You need to be like going and it doesn't take long for people to figure that out but there's always may not be coding but it's important that's it I get back to my computer and and and you know punch out some code.
So now I want to I want to connect the dots so we've done the shaping session we've done one or two de risking sessions where technical people are pushing back and filling in holes and stuff like that. Now there still has to come a point where the third thing happens where there's some sort of a meeting where the CTO is there or whoever is there that makes the resource allocation decision.
And yeah you're trying to say like are we going to do this thing in the next cycle or not is this thing going to happen and you've got more now you've really got more people in the room maybe and and you don't you're in that 30 minute meeting but now it's not a slap dash meeting it's something else.
I'm wondering it starts to sound almost like it sounds a little bit more like a betting table to me in the sense of like you're doing less design work in that session you're not actually trying to come up with the solution but you've got a you've got a proposed solution so you've got a potential bet that you're bringing into the room.
And you've done so much work on it already both from a design side and from a technical sort of de risking side that as the questions come up like what about this what about that you actually have answers to those questions you and you're not spiraling out you're you're you're kind of cutting off all of these uncertainties as they come up.
So I'll tell you I'll tell you the auto books version I think it might actually be a little bit different than how you do it at base camp. I will actually like set no maybe this is the same I will actually settle on what I consider is a de risk pitch at some point in time so I pull to people in the room.
I tell them like you had a lot of like I want you to sleep on this I'm going to grab you later this week I'll pull the next two people and I'll do rounds of that and then there's just a point at which I'm thinking like I could hand this to engineers like nothing's going to jump out and I kind of set it to the side I think you do something similar yeah the interesting thing in auto books is that we do that and we fill our we call it the hopper right we we fill we fill the hopper.
And then the folks that are involved in the betting table on the small business side I'm not saying is our product manager Jordan runs growth and myself are typically making most of the priority decisions. We are all kind of in the know on these so we've participated in shaping to one level or or another and basically it's in the two or so weeks three weeks leading up to when the next cycle will start.
We're having like little 30 minute meetings and and basically it's it the meetings are all about it's more about the business more about our goals and more about the current state of the world then it is then it is anything else so basically we're saying like we've got these three five ten things on the table we actually just did this like.
These clearly will focus more on adoption and sort of kicking that up these will focus on retention a little bit of a churn thing like given it's the end of the year these things are happening we're launching these new banks like what do we actually think we're going to we're going to peel off peel off and work on.
But it's like it's sort of a series like let's me for three minutes all right let's talk again next week like those are good and what it's the box in the wild we're like butting heads sort of making our case and figuring it out.
So you you you're decoupling the the preparation of potential projects from the commitment to those projects because you're even though you might have gotten to a point where you feel like hey this payment form thing is totally shaped up and we feel like we've removed as much risk as we can and we've got good answers to all the questions about it like we we're sure it's going to fit into the six weeks blah blah blah but there's still this other conversation about well but what else is going on.
In our world is this the right time or not. To do it this cycle or do we hold on to it and maybe do it in the future cycle like is that the kind of conversation that's happening that's exactly what are the part and the one thing that I left out is it's just people too right like we're going into a cycle end of the years
always weird right because we have this not quite six weeks Thanksgiving and one of our guys has had no receipts and it's a front end resource so you know what is that change so there's all these these constraints that you you sort of look at and figure out what's going to move the business the most.
This I want to bring it back to to my friend who who was in who's in the larger company who's who's also applying shape up and the after is very similar there too so he says in the new approach the engineer and the designer sat down for the last few days and they reviewed the designs and they spiked some technical
approaches and kind of hammered the scope together and they collaborated on on in his language rewriting the stories with what they had figured out which I think maps to kind of you turning all that those the shaping and the de risking kind of into the pitch right it's like we got that we didn't just go into the room and then say now we need to figure out how to like turn this into something that that
you can do the engineer and the designer actually sit together dig deeper into it resolve the technical issues and then they rewrite the stories in a way that that can that has more knowledge in it now and has firmer answers and clear boundaries and so now he says they're in now they're in a grooming session again like they were before we hit the slap dash version now they're in a grooming session and the engineer is the one who's
in the scope in the story and and the quote is actually tears of joy all around which which you know if you're if you're not part of it maybe it sounds a bit much to say tears of joy but if you've been there that feeling of like whoa like we have good answers for everything we feel certain we have trust we feel like this is actually going to happen you know we're not like dreading getting into this project that has a
bunch of bad holes in it and it's repeatable I mean I think the biggest difference is like even if you if you're in slap dash world you you will eventually stumble upon a problem like I know that insight like I know that customer let's go fix it and you sort of stumble into some concreteness right this is we have now done shape up and deep risking in the bedding so many times like we know like I'll
I'll nitten a look at me like that oh Jordan Jordan drew on the way for the other day like it's it was the circle like the well-bounded scope but it was a dotted line and you said like this is where you're at right now with your project like there's too many holes there's too many but the the the converse of that is like it's that elation of this thing is well bound everyone's going to be
excited about it there's not a lot of holes in it and we're like ready to go and it's it feels fantastic the other thing that I wanted to touch on that you mentioned that we didn't talk about is there is I mentioned the the long running message where we have sort of all of our notes and insights and things like that we do go through a step of when I get done with
the risking I will formalize it's like the last iPad drawing of the breadboard it's a very concise description of here's here's the problem facing auto books the opportunity facing auto books here's what we're going to go do here here the breadboards if you want to you know I always have a little bit of an appendix you want to listen to some interviews or watch some full story videos right here here you go and and and it sort of packages the whole thing up for public public
consumption and we'll say like it sounds like a lot of like rework and busy work but there's there's pride in this right like we've done the work of figuring out what the customer's struggling with and understanding what's going to move the business forward and we're very very confident in that and then it's almost like the passing of the of the torch like the team is going to be able to go crush this and then there's going to be another round of delight like when they actually get it over the
finish line and launch it and we see the outcomes. So there's a big asymmetry here because you are doing more work up front there's there's hours and hours that are going in to prep this work instead of the 30 minutes lap dash but then on the other side of this after you make the bet and the team actually takes over the work they are they're kind of hitting the ground running with way more focus and and clear guardrails and a lot of energy because they feel like we know what to do
this thing makes sense and then as difficult points come up kind of during the cycle for the team that's actually building it they they have something to refer back to to also make trade-offs and say oh that's out of scope that's out of bounds we're not going to spiral out on that.
Yeah that's something to touch on to and and this was actually we didn't do this a whole lot with payment form because it was our first sort of foray through this so I I found myself constantly sort of not constantly probably five times for the project kind of like cornered in my office up against the law with people who are like what about this like we're really in trouble and it was like okay hard decision let's make it okay everyone feel good let's go so it was
a little slap dash are you going on there yeah the the next project we did I won't drain it but it's we call it like the the first in-app experience that you get with auto books we're going to show you how to create an invoice next you like walk you through that process in a really good way.
The scope was so tight that I found myself twice cornered in my office and basically like walk back to the where we have the we call the small business pod all their all their desk and I said like let's pull up the scoping document and we would read through the scoping document they get halfway through and they'd say like yeah we know how to make that decision we know
how to make that trade off it happened twice and then we got to the end of the project and said yeah that happened like four more times we didn't go ask you like we had it right there and it's it's not like it's the instructions are there but they're there it's not a spec design decisions it's not like it's not a spec with a bunch of bullet points and like oh we missed that bullet point it's more like they're re-equaining themselves with the boundaries of what matters and what doesn't
matter so they can then come up with the bullet point of what that detail is that's it and I'm sure it's not I don't know what your experience is it's not a hundred percent but it's like to learn the trust in that work and trust in that document is just fantastic so I want to I want to bring us I want to wrap us up with kind of a reflection that that that you and I talked about you know before we started to record which was that
that you can get into this this question with yourself of you know how do I how do I rearrange my time or or how do I restructure things so that I can work one way versus the other but at there there's a point where no matter what you do you're going to have to make these decisions at some point right so we're talking about kind of the
there's there's the question of process you say oh we have the shaping room and the de-risking sessions and then I write the pitch and then I bring it to the group and then we you know and then we bet on it but there's also just sort of the deeper like facts of the universe like we're going to have to make these tradeoffs at some point and if we don't make them upfront we're going to end up facing those tradeoffs and those difficult decisions
when we have the wrong people in the room too many people in the room and not enough time and then we're going to be like the universe is going to basically push us into a corner where we have to do this sort of mad dash slap dash decision making yeah so I think the example that I gave about the credit being created in the payment form is one of those situations like without our architect calling that out we would have had an
engineer at the probably at the end of the cycle right facing something that's like hey guys did you know that we break all of the invoicing capabilities and auto books by launching this and and then we're at a circuit breaker moment right you guys refer to it as like well there's there is so much accounting complexity it's going on in the back end like they're going to race through it they're going to just either
decide to break it because they're up against time pressure or do something weird or like but to your point the universe is going to force that decision to be made you're either going to make it thoughtfully upfront with two people in a
room or in a de-risking room where we have the freedom to like let's let's talk think about how narrow that problem is to credit we need to not do that credit we got the top people in the room let's think about some some options and come up with a solution you either do it under under those circumstances or you do it when one person is head down saying like I'll just do this and it should be okay and then it turns up just blowing blowing up on you but to your point about the universe it's going to happen one way or another you need to ship code the decision is going to have a
decision is going to have to be made totally so I think that's a good place to stop for today feels like nice to be back nice to a nice to record an episode again you know we'll bless us out to everybody who who was following the first two and you know maybe we'll maybe we'll get another one soon maybe maybe we won't but I feel like we have a lot to talk about so so we are going to stay connected and we'll see what comes next sounds good. All right take care.