How to Drive Bottom-up Adoption of Shape Up – Chris Boakes (Sr. Software Engineer at Zoopla)

#8: Today I am speaking with Chris Boakes, Senior Software Engineer at Zoopla. Zoopla is a real estate company based in London, UK, which is best known for its property search website Zoopla.co.uk.

This conversation is part of a series about companies that use Shape Up, a delivery framework originally created at Basecamp. If you've never heard of Shape Up, check the show notes for a link to the video "Shaping in a nutshell" by Ryan Singer, former head of strategy at Basecamp and author of the book "Shape Up - Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters".

In our conversation, we dive deep into how Chris pitched Shape Up to his team and got both his peers and engineering leadership to agree to trial a new way of working, in an organization that's largely running on Scrum. Chris had previously worked with Shape Up at a startup and when he joined Zoopla, an organization with hundreds of engineers, he immediately started spotting opportunities to improve the way his team worked.

If you're an individual contributor who's thinking of adopting Shape Up in your team, this episode is for you. Enjoy!

Links:
Chris' blog post on Shape Up at Zoopla: https://zoopla.blog/posts/2023/shape-up-at-zoopla/
Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-boakes/
Chris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cboakes
Zoopla: https://www.zoopla.co.uk/
Shaping in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_8M23wVjXk
Shapers & Builders job board: https://www.shapers.builders