I’m currently on my fourth Shape Up cycle as head of marketing at the company I work for.
Shape Up, recently made public by Ryan Singer at Basecamp, is a framework to help companies ship work that matters. While Shape Up primarily focuses on digital product creation, I quickly saw how it could apply to marketing.
The rest of this article assumes you’re familiar with Shape Up concepts.
Here’s what I learned after completing three cycles.
Demand v. Supply
I want to share “why” I got interested in Shape Up in the first place.
Prior to becoming head of marketing, I did extensive research on the problem and solution space that marketers live in today. After listening and talking to marketers across a variety of companies, I had two “aha” moments.
First, at most companies, marketing is a supply-side operation.
Marketing teams crank out tons of content in the hope it will be consumed by their target audience and drive behavior change. It’s a process that generates muda (a term I’ve carefully chosen), because digital marketing today is a conversion funnel game.
Pump and dump content on your audience, then pray some portion “converts” to the next phase of your marketing scheme. This…
