Shape Up

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