Shapers & Builders David Arens

#Bonus: In season 1 of this podcast, I've been speaking with a lot of teams who have adopted Shape Up, a delivery framework originally created at Basecamp. If you've never heard of Shape Up, check below for a link to the video "Shaping in a nutshell" by Ryan Singer, former head of strategy at Basecamp and author of the book "Shape Up - Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters".
Today I am joined by Klaus Breyer and Matt Lane for a very special bonus episode. Matt and Klaus met through the Shape Up forum when Matt posted about seeking collaborators around a Shape Up tooling idea he had. 
Well, this infamous post has now turned the two into co-founders for Dumplink, a lightweight project/task management tool for teams that use Shape Up. But really, calling it "project management software" is not doing it justice, for it's really a communication, de-risking, and sense-making tool for the build teams on software projects.
Listen to Klaus and Matt nerd out about "directed acyclic graphs" and "foliation graphs" and catch an exclusive demo of Dumplink. Since you're listening to the audio version of this podcast, I recommend you check out the video version, too, to get the full picture. There's a link below that takes you directly to the screen-sharing part of our conversation.
Make sure to listen carefully to find out how you can test Dumplink for yourself, today!
Links:Timestamp for the Dumplink demo video: https://youtu.be/8rvqxvQ1bKQ?si=IQKyNNpUYfSZorY-&t=1870Matt's post in the Shape Up forum: https://discourse.learnshapeup.com/t/community-project-proposal-to-help-get-companies-started-with-shape-up/1069/1Klaus' talk at the Shape Up Practitioners meetup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEnrFbR2qso
Dumplink: https://dump.link/
Shaping in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_8M23wVjXkShapers & Builders job board: https://www.shapers.builders

Today I am speaking with Marin Petrov who's part of Camplight, a collective of people working together on software projects and products. Within Camplight, Marin and his team is working on Assista, a trello powerup for better time tracking.
This conversation is part of a series about companies that use Shape Up, a delivery framework originally created at Basecamp. If you've never heard of Shape Up, check the show notes for a link to the video "Shaping in a nutshell" by Ryan Singer, former head of strategy at Basecamp and author of the book "Shape Up - Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters".
In our conversation, Marin explains why Shape Up felt like such a natural fit for the team working on Assista, and how it gave them great language to activities like Shaping. It was fascinating for me to learn about Camplight's setup as a "collective", a way of working together that feels like an "indie hacker, but together" kind of approach.
Enjoy!
Links:Marin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marinwavesCamplight: https://camplight.net/Shaping in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_8M23wVjXkShapers & Builders job board: https://www.shapers.builders

#9: Today I am speaking with Ilya Sterin, VP of Engineering at Medidata, a clinical trial technology company from the US with around 3,000 employees.
This conversation is part of a series about companies that use Shape Up, a delivery framework originally created at Basecamp. If you've never heard of Shape Up, check the show notes for a link to the video "Shaping in a nutshell" by Ryan Singer, former head of strategy at Basecamp and author of the book "Shape Up - Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters".
In our conversation, Ilya explains his approach to introducing Shape Up at scale. We go deep on the core conceptual pillars within Shape Up, like "working iteratively", setting a big enough yet small enough batch size, and fixed time / variable scope. Instead of a dogmatic "book-in-hand" approach, Ilya chose to introduce Shape Up to his teams by reasoning from the principles of software engineering and avoiding putting a label on this "new way of working" as much as possible. 
If you feel like Shape Up might help your team improve but are afraid of being turned down, Ilya's experience might just be what you need to get started. Enjoy!
Links:Ilya's website: https://ilyasterin.com/Ilya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyasterin/Ilya on Twitter: https://twitter.com/isterinMedidata: https://www.medidata.com/Shaping in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_8M23wVjXkShapers & Builders job board: https://www.shapers.builders

#8: Today I am speaking with Chris Boakes, Senior Software Engineer at Zoopla. Zoopla is a real estate company based in London, UK, which is best known for its property search website Zoopla.co.uk.
This conversation is part of a series about companies that use Shape Up, a delivery framework originally created at Basecamp. If you've never heard of Shape Up, check the show notes for a link to the video "Shaping in a nutshell" by Ryan Singer, former head of strategy at Basecamp and author of the book "Shape Up - Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters".
In our conversation, we dive deep into how Chris pitched Shape Up to his team and got both his peers and engineering leadership to agree to trial a new way of working, in an organization that's largely running on Scrum. Chris had previously worked with Shape Up at a startup and when he joined Zoopla, an organization with hundreds of engineers, he immediately started spotting opportunities to improve the way his team worked.
If you're an individual contributor who's thinking of adopting Shape Up in your team, this episode is for you. Enjoy!
Links:Chris' blog post on Shape Up at Zoopla: https://zoopla.blog/posts/2023/shape-up-at-zoopla/Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-boakes/Chris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cboakesZoopla: https://www.zoopla.co.uk/Shaping in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_8M23wVjXkShapers & Builders job board: https://www.shapers.builders

#7: Today I am speaking with David Šabata, who is CTO at ROI Hunter. ROI Hunter is providing SaaS tools for e-commerce companies. The company is mostly remote and has about 80 people, with 30 across product and engineering.
This conversation is part of a series about companies that use Shape Up, a delivery framework originally created at Basecamp. If you've never heard of Shape Up, check the show notes for a link to the video "Shaping in a nutshell" by Ryan Singer, former head of strategy at Basecamp and author of the book "Shape Up - Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters".
In our conversation, we talk about David's growth from individual contributor to engineering leader, and his north start principle of "building a setup that he'd want to step back into as an individual contributor at any moment". David shares how he carefully managed his team's transition to Shape Up by piloting it with a small team and generating early wins, how being strict on each project's allotted time has gotten the team to become true experts in "fixed time / variable scope", and the huge leverage he gets from enabling project teams to focus completely on their work.
Enjoy!
Links:ROI Hunter: https://www.roihunter.com/David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsabata/Shaping in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_8M23wVjXkShapers & Builders job board: https://www.shapers.builders

#Bonus: Today I'm speaking with Mirela Mus, Founder and CPO at Product People. Her team of 41 in-house product managers helps companies cover parental leaves, scale teams up quickly during hyper-growth, and cover any other use case that calls for interim product managers.
This bonus episode breaks with the main theme of season 1 of the Shapers & Builders podcast, which is primarily about case studies of teams using Shape Up. Instead, today we get to enjoy the fact that Mirela and her team have worked within every product development context you can imagine, and learn from the incredible breadth of experience that Mirela has built up over the past 5 years with her team. 
Besides Shape Up, which Mirela experienced during an engagement at TIER mobility, we talk about the general landscape of "software delivery", the intricacies of interim product management, how to evaluate seniority in any role, and what you can learn about product management from reading science-fiction books.
I had the best of times talking to Mirela, and am sure you'll enjoy our conversation!
Links:Product People website: https://www.getproductpeople.com/Mirela on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirelamus/Thinking in Systems: https://www.goodreads.com/ro/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-systemsLeverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/Thinking in Bets: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35957157Player of Games: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18630Use of Weapons: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12007Shaping in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_8M23wVjXkShapers & Builders job board: https://www.shapers.builders