# The 37signals Way > Lean, opinionated product development from Getting Real to Shape Up — an AI agent skill based on *Shape Up* by Jason Fried & DHH. Published 2026-04-12 · Updated 2026-08-17 · Product & Innovation · Free and MIT-licensed Canonical: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/37signals-way/ Source: https://github.com/wondelai/skills/tree/main/37signals-way **Install:** `npx skills add wondelai/skills/37signals-way --global` ## What is the The 37signals Way skill? The 37signals Way carries Shape Up and the wider Basecamp playbook — Getting Real, Rework — into your agent’s working memory. It shapes work against an appetite instead of estimating it, writes pitches with breadboards and named rabbit holes, plans six-week bets behind a circuit breaker, and cuts scope rather than moving the date. ## Key concepts from Shape Up your agent applies - **Build Less** — Competitive advantage through deliberate omission — fewer features maintained indefinitely, underdo the competition instead of outdo them. - **Shaping the Work** — Define work that is rough, solved, and bounded before assigning it to a team. Use breadboarding and fat marker sketches. Set appetite, not estimates. - **Betting & Cycles** — Six-week fixed cycles with a circuit breaker — if it doesn't ship, it doesn't get an automatic extension. Two-week cool-downs between cycles. Abolish backlogs. - **Small Teams** — Three-person autonomous units (1 designer, 1–2 programmers) with full authority over implementation. Track progress with hill charts, not standups. - **Opinionated Software** — Ship with strong defaults over endless preferences. Write clear, honest copy. Say no to most feature requests and let the product reflect a clear point of view. ## When to use The 37signals Way — and when not to Reach for it when: - Every project overruns and the response each time is a longer estimate rather than a smaller piece of work. - Your backlog holds four hundred items and grooming it has become someone’s recurring meeting. - Work reaches the team as a one-line ticket and the first fortnight goes on working out what it meant. - A six-week project is in week nine and nobody can say what would have to be dropped to land it. Reach for something else when: - You do not yet know what to build — shaping assumes a settled problem, so start with Continuous Discovery. - Demand is still unproven and a six-week bet is too large a wager — Lean Startup’s experiments come first. - The bottleneck is dependencies between many teams rather than one team’s scope — Team Topologies is the better lens. - You want a company-wide operating system with scorecards, rocks and quarterly reviews — Traction EOS is a different animal. ## About Jason Fried & DHH Co-founders of 37signals (Basecamp), creators of Ruby on Rails. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) co-founded 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY. DHH also created Ruby on Rails. Ryan Singer, former Head of Strategy at 37signals, authored Shape Up, codifying the company's product development methodology. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson · https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q719413 ## Example prompts - Shape a pitch for this feature idea using appetite, breadboard, and risks using 37signals-way skill _(Product shaping)_ - Plan a six-week cycle for our team with shaped work and cool-down using 37signals-way skill _(Cycle planning)_ - Apply the "build less" philosophy to cut scope on this feature using 37signals-way skill _(Scope management)_ - Design a small-team structure for shipping this project autonomously using 37signals-way skill _(Team organization)_ ## Frequently asked questions ### How do I install the The 37signals Way skill? Run `npx skills add wondelai/skills/37signals-way --global`. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The The 37signals Way skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills. ### Which book is the The 37signals Way skill based on? It packages *Shape Up* by Jason Fried & DHH — co-founders of 37signals (Basecamp), creators of Ruby on Rails. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering build less, shaping the work and betting & cycles. It sits in the Product & Innovation part of the library. ### What does “appetite” mean, and how is it different from an estimate? An estimate starts from a design and asks how long it takes. An appetite starts from time — two weeks, or six — and asks what is worth building inside it. Fixed before the work is shaped, it does the arguing for you later: when a cycle gets tight you cut scope to fit the appetite instead of moving the date. The circuit breaker enforces it. A project that misses its six weeks gets no automatic extension; it returns to shaping and must win a fresh bet. ### How does a six-week cycle relate to a Design Sprint? They are both fixed-length containers answering completely different questions. A design sprint spends five days deciding whether an idea is worth pursuing at all, and ends with a prototype and five customer reactions. A Shape Up cycle spends six weeks building and shipping something you have already decided to bet on. One is discovery, the other is delivery with a hard boundary — and running a sprint inside a cycle defeats both, because Shape Up assumes the shaping happened before the betting table. ### Shape Up is free online — why use the skill? Because the friction was never access. Reading Shape Up does not produce a pitch for your feature with a stated appetite, a breadboard of the places and affordances, marked rabbit holes and an explicit no-gos list — your agent does that in a couple of minutes and then argues with you about scope. Read the book at basecamp.com/shapeup, it takes an afternoon. Use the skill when there is real work on the table to shape. ### Does any of this survive outside a company like Basecamp? Less cleanly than the book suggests. Shape Up assumes small autonomous teams, no backlog, no externally promised delivery dates and the authority to cut scope without asking. Few companies have all four. What travels well is appetite, shaping before betting, and cutting scope instead of moving dates. What breaks first is the six-week rigidity and abolishing the backlog outright. Describe your constraints in the prompt and the skill will adapt the philosophy; leave them out and you will get advice written for a company that answers to nobody. ## Related - All Product & Innovation skills: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/product/ - Jobs to Be Done: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/jobs-to-be-done/ - Hooked UX: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/hooked-ux/ - Improve Retention: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/improve-retention/ - Lean Startup: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/lean-startup/ - Design Sprint: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/design-sprint/ - Continuous Discovery: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/continuous-discovery/ - Inspired: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/inspired-product/ - The Mom Test: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/mom-test/ - Lean Analytics: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/lean-analytics/