Shape Up Pitch Template for Agile Teams

[Scrum](/glossary/scrum) uses two-week sprints with daily standups, a product backlog, and defined roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner). Shape Up uses six-week cycles with two-week cooldowns, pitched and bet work, and no backlog. The key philosophical difference: Scrum manages a continuous flow of prioritized work. Shape Up makes discrete bets on shaped projects. Both can work well depending on the team's context.

Yes. Many teams adopt the pitch format for shaping work while keeping their existing sprint cadence. The pitch is useful regardless of your delivery methodology because it forces you to define the problem, set a time constraint, sketch a solution, and name what is out of scope. Those elements improve any planning process.

Typically a senior PM, designer, or technical lead. The pitcher needs enough product and technical knowledge to shape a solution at the right level of abstraction. Junior team members can write pitches with mentorship, but the shaping skill takes practice. The [Product Discovery Handbook](/discovery-guide) covers the research and validation that feeds into shaping.

They stop. That is the rule. If the work is not shippable at the end of the time-box, it gets evaluated: is it worth another bet (re-pitch for the next cycle), or should the team ship what they have and move on? Shape Up treats missed time-boxes as a signal that the shaping was insufficient, not that the team was too slow.