Why Font Awesome Uses Shape Up: Ditching Backlogs and Shipping Better Software

In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Font Awesome co-founder Travis Chase for a deep dive into the project management philosophy that keeps the FA ship sailing smoothly — Shape Up, the brainchild of 37signals (makers of Basecamp). If you're tired of bloated backlogs, eternal sprints, or shipping stress, this one’s for you.

They contrast Shape Up with traditional methodologies like Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, and Kanban, and unpack how Font Awesome’s flavor of Shape Up—built around six-week splits and two-week cooldowns — helps them actually ship meaningful features without burning out. They also talk about the power of constraints, creative freedom, and why abandoning some work is not a failure —it's strategy.

🤓 What We Cover in This Episode

• 🧠 Why Shape Up beats the backlog bloat
• 🛠️ The downside of building everything all at once
• 📦 How six-week splits & two-week cooldowns keep FA productive
• 🚀 Space Awesome and other cool-down creations
• 🔮 How creative constraints unlock innovation
• 💡 Tools like Haunt Forge & Icon Wizard born from autonomy
• 📚 37signals’ books that shaped Font Awesome's ethos

⏱️ Timestamps

• [00:00:09] Shape Up Method and How Font Awesome Uses It
• [00:02:41] Traditional Waterfall and Agile Methodologies
• [00:04:22] Agile and Kanban Methods in the Real World
• [00:07:51] Product Development Lifecycle with Shape Up
• [00:09:15] Six-Week Splits and Two-Week Cooldowns
• [00:11:18] Side Projects like “Space Awesome”
• [00:12:39] Shape Up Workflow Breakdown
• [00:15:39] Project Management Meets Business Philosophy
• [00:19:16] 40-Hour Work Weeks & Whole-Person Thinking
• [00:20:51] Autonomy & Creative Flow at Work
• [00:22:39] Behind the Scenes of Haunt Forge
• [00:23:56] Icon Wizard + the Magic of Constraints
• [00:27:35] Iterative Dev à la Basecamp
• [00:29:41] Wrapping Up: Software and Project Management Insights

🔗 Links & Resources

• 📘 Shape Up (Book) 
• 📗 Always Be Shipping (and On Time for Dinner): Why We Use Shape Up 
• 🧠 It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
• ⚙️ Haunt Forge Font Engine
• 🧙‍♂️ Icon Wizard
• 🎵 The Font Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin
• 🎧 Audio mastering by Chris Enns and Lemon Productions

🔖 Noteworthy Quotes

"One of the surprising things and sort of a takeaway I took from reading Shape Up is that it's okay — It might even be expected that certain work gets abandoned and that shipping really is the highest priority and that backlogs kill productivity. And that kind of goes along with the philosophy, too, of work, that you have to have constraints and limits to actually allow creativity to flow. And you can't do everything. So you do have to have constraints. You do have to be able to say no. "

"Dave and I take a lot of inspiration from the books that 37Signals put out like Rework and It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work. And trying to maybe do business differently, do our own spin on it, see what works for us based on all the places we've worked. And kind of how we would try to change things."

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