How Adopting Shape Up Transformed Our Approach to Product Development

After working in healthcare technology for more than two decades, I’ve experienced my fair share of product roadmaps, often as the creator and owner of the artifact. And while they look great in slide decks and client presentations, roadmaps that project out over quarters or even years rarely hold up. Even though we internally acknowledge that "things will definitely change by the time we get there," the reality isn't always that obvious to everyone who views the roadmap. It’s a promise that doesn’t consider the fast-moving changes in the market or the real-time needs of our clients. 

That’s why adopting the Shape Up methodology has been a game-changer for us at Validic.

Moving Away from the Traditional Roadmap

Roadmaps can be useful as a tool to illustrate where you’d like to go, given the information you know today. They can give insight to current and future clients around the strategic direction that is currently forecasted based on market conditions and feedback from current clients and users. The big problem with roadmaps arises when it’s not understood that most roadmaps are a point-in-time projection of a possible future state and not a delivery plan. 

Traditional roadmaps give the illusion of certainty. When you show a timeline with “upcoming features” 6–12 months in advance, you often create expectations for your clients that “these things will be coming next and in this order.” The roadmap then becomes a bureaucratic checklist that distracts from what really matters: solving problems for your clients right now.

When we were still in the roadmap mindset, so much of our time was spent just "reviewing progress against the list" with clients and stakeholders. These conversations were often more about whether we were hitting the arbitrary expectations we’d set a year ago than about the challenges our clients were facing today. In some situations, even though all end user stakeholders agreed a different feature would provide more value if it was developed next, other success metrics were tied to “delivering the features on the roadmap.” 

The wildest  part? When we finally abandoned our year-plus roadmap in favor of adopting the Shape Up methodology, we revisited that old roadmap a year later and found that we had delivered over 75% of the features listed—but on a timeline that better aligned with client needs. Some of the undelivered features, it turns out, weren’t even needed or weren’t needed yet. Our overall strategy remained very aligned with the needs of our client base, but by abandoning the year-long list of “commitments,” we delivered what mattered now. 

Focusing on What Clients Need Today—and Tomorrow

The biggest shift in adopting Shape Up is how it allowed us to stop chasing promises and focus on solving real, pressing problems. Strategy, for us, is now about working closely with clients, listening to their challenges, and iterating on solutions quickly. It’s less about promising feature sets 12 months down the road and more about asking, "What do our clients need right now? How can we creatively solve the problems they’ll have tomorrow?"

Roadmaps created a product prioritization approach that was like trying to “skate to where the puck will be” in an attempt to forecast how our clients would adopt and grow the usage of our products. That mentality led to delivering a lot of interesting features, but to follow the prior analogy, we missed the fact that clients couldn’t even hit the puck because they were struggling to lace up their skates. So while we had advanced our product portfolio and “delivered on our promises,” the more immediate day-to-day pain points of our client base were often not prioritized. 

Shape Up has given us a solid framework and structure to follow. We only work on what is needed now/next. We determine that by being closer than ever to our clients and their needs. The process motivates all parties to communicate regularly and stay focused on the things that are needed to solve real problems, versus waiting for the “next big thing” coming in the next year. Our clients know that their requests will be actively discussed and prioritized every eight weeks versus the “old way,” which was jockeying for position somewhere on the roadmap (often at the end).

We’re also highly predictable in our development and delivery cycles, allowing us to manage expectations and hit deadlines while staying flexible. We’ve learned how to focus on what’s most important—our clients’ immediate and emerging needs—without being tied to promises we made months (or years) ago.

Agile—But Not Chaotic

Some people hear "flexibility" and think "chaos," but Shape Up has actually made us more predictable. I was even asked, “well if you don’t have a roadmap, do you even have a strategy?” I would argue that by abandoning our old process involving managing a roadmap, our ability to be strategic has increased, as we have empowered our commercial teams to continuously collaborate with our product and engineering teams to build the things most important to our strategy, but based on the most current information, not what was important 3, 6, or even 12 months ago. 

We now have a development cycle that is disciplined and structured, allowing for rapid feedback from clients. Shorter cycles give us the chance to ship value quickly, learn from it, and make decisions about what to work on next with real data in hand.

The best part? The conversations we’re having with our clients are now centered around their success, not around whether we’re hitting feature milestones. By delivering value in small, focused cycles, we’re able to make adjustments on the fly and ensure that what we’re building actually moves the needle for them. They’re more successful because we’re working together in almost real-time to discover their needs.

This doesn’t mean we only build small things. We’ve also used the Shape Up process to work incredibly hard to define the right sizes of incremental value that we can deliver versus  “going underground” and delivering a big thing in 12 months (or, let’s be honest, twice that long). This has allowed us to work on an important big feature in phases. We’ve had features where we easily could have used 12 months of work to deliver everything, but after getting one or two cycles of work to the client, it turned out to be enough for that feature, and they had other big requests that had emerged by using other parts of the product. 

Incremental Value Creation - Continuous Glucose Monitoring

The shorter development cycles force us to really work closely with our clients to determine what valuable features we can build and deliver. An example of this is how we incrementally delivered functionality around Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) throughout 2024. Talking with clients helped us determine a highly constrained scope that would still solve for some of the bigger pain points. We prioritized the features to enable those workflows end-to-end. After three development cycles we now have a solution we are actively implementing at a client. 

In the past, these types of client discussions often got bogged down with trying to ensure every feature is accounted for, stakeholders jockeying for which features should be first on the “roadmap” and often a lack of clarity on what “done” would even look like. 

However, because our clients know that our process involves continuously working with them on what is needed next, they trusted that while the initial scope might be smaller than the big picture, we’d have opportunities (every 8 weeks) to revisit whether that next CGM feature is really the most important thing to their business or whether we should prioritize some more urgent need. Again knowing these opportunities to work together are only ever 8 weeks away.

The CGM project has been a great success, delivering initial value by offering GCM data in our IoT platform, to building a robust proof of concept to show clients how CGM will manifest in clinical programs, to offering fully functional GCM programs that allow patients to seamlessly share their data with their care team, without having to visit the clinic or force the care team to log into the CGM vendor apps. 

Another outcome of having shorter cycles was that as we started to consume the CGM data, we realized that some updates needed to be made to how the data was being modeled, and those improvements were pitched and bet on in the next development cycle. That work was deemed top priority to facilitate the launch and growth of our clients using CGM data. Because we work on what is most critical every cycle, the old exercise of moving all the boxes around on the “roadmap” didn’t have to happen. Every feature previously committed didn’t have to bump out by 8 weeks, no clients had to be told the things they saw “on the roadmap” were all shifted. We get to be proud of what we prioritize and deliver, not continuously apologize for making smart, timely decisions that result in client expectations needing to be reset. 

Failing Successfully - The Pitfalls of “Delivering the Roadmap”

Looking back, the biggest danger of traditional roadmaps was that they turned into an anchor, slowing us down and pulling us away from solving immediate problems, and locking us into delivering what was “promised,” whether it was still relevant or not. So we delivered the roadmap…success! But it’s not relevant anymore…fail. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen projects get bogged down because the roadmap became the goal. It’s a classic example of mistaking activity for progress.

In contrast, by following Shape Up, we’re able to stay focused on what’s important—solving the right problems at the right time. We’ve allowed ourselves to take interesting paths when new information or opportunities arise. And instead of having the specter of “things promised last year” lingering over every sprint, we’re free to focus on what really matters: making our clients wildly successful.

Conclusion: Focus on What Matters

Since adopting our version of Shape Up, we’ve seen a shift not just in how we work, but in how our clients see us. We’ve moved from the rigidity of roadmap-driven development to a flexible, yet structured process that enables us to tackle the real problems at hand. By breaking away from the traditional roadmap, we’ve gained the freedom to do what we do best: work closely with our clients to deliver innovative solutions that meet their needs today—and in the future.

When changing things as fundamental as your entire product planning and prioritization process, it’s critical to ensure you have buy-in from all key internal stakeholders. We developed our own “flavor” of the Shape Up methodology that works for our employees and our clients. Our commercial team was skeptical at first, wondering how we’d manage without being able to show clients a long-term roadmap. Not being able to make commitments to our clients on work six or twelve months out. But, they have found it incredibly empowering to be able to sit down with clients and say, “let’s talk about what you need next.” That’s a great way to build strong relationships with clients versus showing them a list of 20 things coming in the next 12 months, where they only care about one or two items, or worse, none.

Shape Up has given us the best of both worlds: a predictable development process and the freedom to adapt as we go. If I had one takeaway for others in the industry, it’s this—don’t let the roadmap hold you hostage. Stay focused on what really matters, and you’ll not only meet your goals, but you’ll deliver more value to your clients along the way.