Traits & Roles Within a Successful Shape Up Team – Heiko Behrens (VP Product at Memfault)

Shapers & Builders

#2: Today I am speaking with Heiko Behrens, VP of product at Memfault, an IoT reliability platform. Before joining Memfault, Heiko has had an impressive career in engineering roles at Pebble smart watches, working on augmented reality devices at Intel, and most recently on the Oculus VR headset at Facebook / Meta.

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, Heiko walks us closely through the product development process at Memfault, and how they've adopted and adapted Shape Up to their liking. What struck me the most was how rigorously Heiko and his colleagues have designed their process, incl. detailed playbooks for the "hats" that different people wear at different times. It feels like Heiko and the team are tackling this process design very much like an engineering problem, even keeping a changelog of how the process evolves with each cycle.

We get to talk about various tools that the team has developed to, for example, keep track of scopes of work, plan who's available, and manage well-formulated project briefings. Heiko also underscores that it's important to embrace the iteration in how you work, and that there's no "end state of enlightenment" that you're trying to reach.

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Links:
Contact Heiko: https://heikobehrens.com/
Memfault: https://memfault.com/
Shaping in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_8M23wVjXk
Shapers & Builders job board: https://www.shapers.builders