How Granola builds with shaping and validating At Granola, shaping and validating are the first two stages of a three-stage product-building process that Chris Pedregal describes as staged rather than role-based, loosely inspired by Basecamp's Shape Up [^b241b253-ce39-55fe-8d0d-8b79bea28e90]: 1. Shaping — start from a job to be done and explore as many possible solution shapes as fast as possible, then be brutally honest about whether people would actually “hire” the solution. 2. Validating — prove the idea is useful for a small number of people, and that they choose to use it. 3. Scale — only after shaping and validating succeed does Granola invest in making the product reliable, polished, and scalable. ## Why the order matters The staged process keeps small teams honest early: shaping is about breadth of exploration before commitment, while validating is about evidence of real demand — not just that people could use the feature, but that they actively pick it. Only once both are true does the team spend on polish and scale. This contrasts with the “pirates and architects” framing Dan offers: a pirate builds fast by intuition to find something valuable, and an architect turns what's found into a sustainable system. Shaping and validating are Granola's own, stage-based take on the same underlying idea. - Shaping: explore many possible solution shapes quickly, starting from a job to be done, and honestly judge whether people would “hire” the solution. - Validating: prove it's useful to a few people and that they choose to use it. - Scale comes last — reliability and polish are only invested after the idea survives shaping and validation.