Basecamp's Shape Up Is a Michelin Restaurant Brigade System for Software

While I can appreciate all of this, and I’ve seen other organizations using the Shape Up methodology, I think that Basecamp themselves are not a very good case study of success.

They have been losing relative mindshare and possibly marketshare more recently. Its competitors are growing more aggressively.

I started researching how Michelin-starred restaurants coordinate their teams - not because I care about fancy food, but because they solve exactly this: small specialized teams creating something complex together under pressure.

The parallels to software are exact. Front of house/back of house coordination. Pre-service meetings. The "pass" as a coordination point. Station ownership. The quiet kitchen principle.

Then I discovered Basecamp's Shape Up is essentially their version of the brigade de cuisine system. 6-week cycles, betting table, appetite setting, cool-down periods. It maps perfectly.

I wrote this to work through what small bootstrapped software companies can learn from how these organizations actually operate. Would love feedback from others dealing with this coordination problem.