Ryan Singer - How I wrote Shape Up
After the workshop, I emailed every attendee and asked if I could interview them by phone. The interview wasn’t about the workshop — it was about what was going on in their company when they decided to apply. I had a lot to say about product development, but I didn’t know which specific things actually mattered to people. I didn’t know what they were struggling with. The interviews gave me a way to learn what was going wrong in their teams, how they made the decision to attend the workshop, and what they hoped to get out of it.
I did a quick jobs-to-be-done analysis on the interviews and pulled out four jobs they were hiring the workshop to do. Since I considered the workshop a proxy for the book, I could use these jobs to define the key requirements.
— Ryan Singer