The 37signals Way
Lean, opinionated product development from Getting Real to Shape Up
Build lean, opinionated products using the 37signals philosophy from Getting Real, Rework, and Shape Up. This skill equips your AI agent with the principles behind Basecamp's approach — shaping work with appetite instead of estimates, betting on six-week cycles, running small autonomous teams, and treating deliberate omission as a competitive advantage.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/37signals-way --global basecamp.com
Shape Up Jason Fried & DHH View the book
02 What it is
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.
03 Key concepts
Five principles your agent applies.
Drawn from Shape Up — not advice it repeats back to you, but decisions it makes while it works.
04 Fit
When to use it, and
when not to.
four symptoms it fixes, and four it doesn't.
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.
05 Prompts
Say it like this.
Name the skill at the end of a prompt and the agent applies the framework rather than a vibe. Or say nothing — it loads on its own when a task matches.
Shape a pitch for this feature idea using appetite, breadboard, and risks using 37signals-way skill
Plan a six-week cycle for our team with shaped work and cool-down using 37signals-way skill
Apply the "build less" philosophy to cut scope on this feature using 37signals-way skill
Design a small-team structure for shipping this project autonomously using 37signals-way skill
06 About the author
07 Same stack
The stack it sits in.
Ten Product & Innovation skills. Most people run two: this one, and whichever fits the next problem.
All Product & Innovation skills08 Questions
Before you install.
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.
09 Guides that use it
Put it to work.
Long-form playbooks where this skill does part of the job.
One skill, one command.
Install The 37signals Way, or the whole stack.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/37signals-way --global MIT licensed · Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes · No account