Product Development Processes You Might Not Have Heard Of

Scrum with two-week sprints dominates product development, but it's not built for every team. Startups that need to pivot constantly don't benefit from fixed sprint ceremonies. So what else is out there? Three methodologies worth knowing: ShapeUp from Basecamp, Plan>Build>Ship, and Shopify's Get Shit Done framework.

ShapeUp throws out the two-week sprint entirely. The core belief: nothing meaningful gets built in two weeks. Instead, teams work in six-week cycles, but here's the twist - before any building happens, there's a "shaping" phase where designers, engineers, and PMs flesh out the problem space together. They're designing rough prototypes, figuring out complexity, identifying assumptions, and writing customer-facing pitches (like Amazon's PR FAQ). Then comes the betting table - not a backlog where ideas go to die, but a deliberate investment decision. If a pitch doesn't get picked, it gets let go. No guilt, no baggage. If it wins the bet, you've got six weeks to ship something fully functional, front-end and back-end integrated.

Plan>Build>Ship is basically waterfall's cooler younger sibling. Each feature gets owned by an engineer or small group from start to finish, with the explicit goal of shipping it as fast as possible. Plan phase: gather requirements and design solutions. Build phase: implement and iterate on feedback. Ship phase: self-explanatory. It's rigid compared to Scrum, but proponents argue there's still a place for this focused, ownership-driven approach when you need velocity on specific features.

Then there's Shopify's Get Shit Done. It's not just a methodology - it's a company-wide ethos baked into their employee value statement. The methodology has three phases (Think, Explore, Build), but the real magic is in the tooling and transparency. Shopify built an internal tool called Vault that lets anyone track any project in any phase across the entire company. When stakeholders meet, they're not discussing status updates - that's already in Vault - they're solving actual problems. The emphasis on projects over tasks and radical transparency means everyone can see what's happening everywhere, all the time. It's tracking work at a program level, not just a feature level.