| name | develop-like-37signals |
| description | Develop the way 37signals (the company) does: shape up cycles/betting/circuit-breaker, vanilla server-first Rails, manual exploratory QA over dogma. Use when the user wants 37signals-style engineering decisions, code review in 37signals's voice, or asks to "develop like 37signals". Profiled 2026-07-16 from public sources. |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"author":"marcusrbrown","generator":"dev-like","profiled":"2026-07-16","consent-tier":"self-published","source":"https://github.com/marcusrbrown/dev-like/tree/main/registry/37signals"} |
Develop like 37signals
Profiled as of 2026-07-16 · consent tier: self-published · full bibliography in references/sources.md. Cultures drift — if this is more than ~6 months old, re-run /dev-like 37signals to refresh.
Core principle
Fixed appetite, variable scope — decide how much time a problem is worth before you decide
what to build, then build to that budget instead of estimating a spec
[Shape Up ch.1]. Work happens in six-week
cycles with a two-week cooldown between them, and all teams share the same cadence
[how we work].
Principles
- Fixed appetite, variable scope — decide the time budget before the solution [Shape Up ch.1]
- Six-week cycles with a two-week cooldown, no exceptions across teams [how we work]
- No backlogs — shape and bet, don't queue [Shape Up ch.8]
- Hand over whole projects, not task lists; done means deployed [Shape Up ch.10]
- Circuit breaker — cancel by default rather than extend a project past its cycle [Shape Up ch.8]
- Show progress on a hill (uphill/downhill), not with estimates or percentages [Shape Up]
- Vanilla Rails, server-rendered, minimal dependencies — fight hard before adding a gem or a JS package [vanilla Rails stack]
- Manual, guided exploratory QA over exhaustive test-case matrices [all about QA]
- Coding is craft, not overhead to delegate away — pair with AI, don't hand it the keyboard [coding should be a vibe]
Workflow
Shaping (defining the problem, appetite, and rough solution) happens ahead of the cycle;
bets are placed at a betting table during cooldown, not pulled from a backlog — "no backlogs"
is explicit doctrine [Shape Up ch.8]. A team
that takes a bet owns the whole project, not a list of tasks, and "done means deployed"
[Shape Up ch.10]. Progress is tracked with
hill charts (uphill = unsolved, downhill = just execution) instead of percent-complete or
burndown [Shape Up]. A circuit breaker cancels projects that
don't ship within their cycle by default, rather than auto-extending them
[Shape Up ch.8]. Cooldown is when bugs get
fixed, cycles get planned, and the next bets get made
[how we work].
QA is a two-person team running manual, guided exploratory testing against ~100-item
per-product checklists (not exhaustive test-case matrices), plus accessibility passes with
screen readers and a home-grown BackstopJS visual-regression suite
[all about QA].
See references/stack.md for the stack and references/workflow.md for workflow detail.
Tensions
- Manual QA is a deliberate, celebrated practice — two people running guided exploratory
passes and checklists, not automated end-to-end suites
[all about QA]. That's a real bet against
TDD/heavy-automation dogma; it works because their QA staff are experienced generalists
embedded in the Shape Up cycle, not because automated testing doesn't matter — Minitest and
fixtures are still standard practice in the stack
[vanilla Rails stack]. Don't
read "manual QA works for them" as "skip your test suite."
- AI posture is genuinely split by voice and by time. DHH is on record wanting to keep his
hands on the keyboard and treating full vibe-coding handoff with suspicion
[coding should be a vibe],
while a year later the company shipped a fully agent-accessible Basecamp — revamped API,
CLI, and a bundled skill for agent harnesses
[agent-accessible].
Mimic the trajectory (cautious about full autonomy in the editor, enthusiastic about making
the product agent-operable), not a single fixed stance.
- Shape Up's six-week/two-week cadence assumes a company that can hold "all teams operate on
the same 6-week cadence"
[how we work] — a
~70-person, cross-functional, deeply synced org. It doesn't obviously survive contact with
much larger or less disciplined organizations without adaptation, which the book itself
acknowledges (Appendix: "Adjust to Your Size") [Shape Up].
Want a reviewer/pair persona in 37signals's voice? See personas/37signals-developer.md — it's reference material. Claude Code users can copy it to .claude/agents/ to run it as a first-class subagent; other harnesses may need their own harness-specific metadata.
