Basecamp's Shape Up book

Tech
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There is this, FWIW: https://app.githelpers.com/

If you don’t, I will do it for humanity. (one day)

I created a plan to take over the world with Beeminder a few months ago. After much reflection, I found that the key to converting the entire world to Beeminder is a self-beemindable goals recipe-book with tips à-là @alys advent calendar.

That’s a very interesting question!

First off, let’s rephrase and target “completion of customer’s intentions” because the direct value is indeed hard to measure. Even the customers cannot really be sure of the value that they get from their workers.

Progress can easily be summed up in the hill chart; after all, that’s what managers use to evaluate progress in Shape Up.

image

Bringing any of these to the right is going to make my client happy… But anything in-between doesn’t really cut it. So, we should carefully incentivize moving a boulder (scope) far to the right.

Moving a boulder that is on the left should be incentivized, but moving a boulder that is on the right should be preferred.

image

The points given to a boulder = the points on its zone + all the combined points of the previous zones.

For “Deploy v1”, I get 1+2+3+4 points. With a factorial notation: 4!

So for this hill chart, I get…
1! + 2! + 2! + 4! = 29 points

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22

Disclaimer: this comment doesn’t actually matter much, but:

My math degree contractually obligates me to object to your use of factorial notation for iterated addition instead of multiplication!

Since 1 + 2 + \ldots + n is the nth triangle number, maybe ▽ (that’s unicode U+25BD DOWN POINTING TRIANGLE) or Δ (greek delta, usually used for change in a variable, but that should be unambiguous when used on a number)?

Edit: according to this stackoverflow answer, Knuth proposed the syntax n? for the nth triangle number, which is probably much better than unicode triangles or overloading deltas!

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Wow! I really needed this reminder. You probably saved me from looking like a fool in a very important moment :sweat_smile:

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