Shape Up

There were some good ideas here, but I think this could have been a series of blog posts rather than a book. I've found this to be the case with a few other 37Signals books I've read, if you read the blog you basically have the content of the book.
I think I'm just not a huge fan of business books, they prescribe trite solutions to complex problems, and if their being honest they tend to dilute said trite solutions with so many caveats that the advice becomes generic.
Two stars because, I do think there are some interesting ideas and this this book is just nebulous enough that said ideas can be applied to almost any team or small organization.

Very clearly explains one company's iteration upon classic scrum development methodology. Not a process I can apply to my own work environment but still contained useful insights and was interesting.

This was amazing. Finally I read a book about product development that is NO bullshit, firmly grounded in the firms actual practices based on trial and error, and is based on the most important aspect of development - shipping the work.

Key takeaways for me here were:
- Detailed and case study based approach to designing with abstraction (fat markers / breadboarding). Very clearly articulated the how and why ‘shaping' in this way early on will be beneficial later.
- Separating work into scopes, and getting work done ‘vertically' instead of ‘horizontally'. This is surprisingly similar to Stanislavsky's ‘chunking' approach to breaking down text.
The idea here being to clearly separate a job into achievable chunks, and get the chunks done on the design and code end at the same time, so the project is always running on momentum.

A lot of lessons in this book that make so much sense, but I had to be told.

Just about to start my first 6 week cycle on a new project - will report back!
Yahoo

Great insight into how Basecamp gets shit done. I'd love to be a part of a team like that one day to experience it first hand.

Strongly recommended read for all managers and all who want to be one.

This is a good book on how a practitioner should run a product based agile team. Even though it heavily emphasizes their own tools and partly comes off as marketing material for base camp, the lessons here are widely applicable. There are some interesting techniques here which agile teams should think about from running larger 6-week sprint sizes to how scope discovery and task confidence builds during project. The best part is that this is a free book and a fast read.