I'm Ryan, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp and author of Shape Up. Ask me anything!

@thedreamydryad I still have all kinds of doubts. They just don’t matter. It’s more fun to do things because you enjoy them and find them interesting and look for some way that they can be of use to other people.

@thechanch At Basecamp we dissolve this separation between independent contributor and manager with what we call “moonlight managers.” All managers have to do Real Work — make something. Then some percentage of their time is spent on managing other people, not all their time. This keeps everybody on the ground and connected with the realities of the work.

@simon_lind First, if your designers can’t code their own views (eg HTML/CSS for web apps) you’ll pay a very big tax. There are also tech decisions to make that affect this. If you choose a single page app approach like React, you’ll pay another tax because designers can’t directly contribute HTML/CSS. It all has to get converted into component code. In the majority of cases this isn’t worth it. It’s better to go with an HTML over the wire approach like Rails. This is especially true for small teams. A component approach makes sense for a huge company where modularity gives you scale. At a small company it’s a disadvantage, not an advantage. This also applies to how you think about mobile apps. Our mobile apps are 90% web views, glued together to native components with some special tricks. It’s an order of magnitude difference in the cross collaboration between design and programming because you remove this big barrier of coding the UI into native views. The shaping role is intrinsically cross-discipline. Shaping is bringing strategy, design, and tech literacy together to come up with the outlines of a concept worth betting on. One discipline that’s often overlooked is writing skill. We always prefer people who are the better writers when hiring because we do so much asynchronous communication.

@kingshuk_mukherjee1 Yes. Mostly it removed a lot of barriers to shipping. It didn’t have to be perfect, I didn’t have to find every typo, we didn’t need to figure out how to lay out the images in certain way for pages in a print book, etc. And we wanted it to be very shareable — something people could easily quote or refer other people to. I did get a lot of helpful feedback in the first few days—mostly about typos and things like that. Then as the emails and tweets came, I discovered what questions people had and what needed to be added. This is helping us get to a point where we are more confident about releasing the book in other formats that are less malleable, like Kindle or pint.

@rjs Thanks Ryan. Great book and I appreciate how much effort when into documenting your processes. I'm learning a ton.

@berkshop I don’t think there’s a formula. I would start on the ground in real life with people you know who need this thing and work out from there.

@abadesi Thanks for organizing. I enjoyed it.