Something happened while writing this series. The vocabulary started working.
Not the essays themselves — I don't hand founders a blog post and wait for a reaction. But the words. The shapes I'd named — imagined, founder, made, measured, felt, ruled, enacted — started showing up in rooms where I hadn't put them. In my own sentences, mid-conversation, before I'd planned what I was reaching for. I'd hear myself say something like we're arguing about imagined shape right now, but the measured shape is the problem — and the room would shift.
Not dramatically. Not the way a pitch lands or a prototype provokes. More like the moment someone adjusts the focus on a lens and the blur resolves into an image everyone can see.
The simplest move in shape work is naming which shape the room is in.
It costs nothing. No Saturday of building. No prototype, no artifact, no mock. Just a sentence: you're talking about the experience right now — the felt shape. She's in the numbers. He's building toward something that doesn't match either.
You don't resolve the gap. You make it visible. And something about making it visible — giving the gap a name, a location — changes what the room can do next.
I keep watching this happen. A product conversation that's been circling for twenty minutes, everyone smart, everyone engaged, nobody moving. Not because they disagree. Because they're in different shapes and don't know it. The engineer is in the made shape — what the code can actually do, what the architecture will and won't support. The founder is in the imagined shape — a future three versions away, luminous and compelling and not yet real. The board member is in the measured shape — traction, retention, the numbers that will justify the next round.
Each person's position is rational inside the shape they're inhabiting. The argument can't resolve because it's not one argument. It's three.
Name that, and the conversation changes. It gives people permission to step back from their position and see it as a position — one shape among several. The founder who was defending the vision can say yes, I'm in the imagined shape, and I know the measured shape hasn't caught up yet.
The product in the founder's head, the product in the code, the product in the customer's hands, the product on the dashboard — these aren't different views of the same thing. They're different objects. They share a name and a codebase and they are not the same product.
When you name which shape someone is inside, you're not just describing what was already there. The naming does something — it draws the distinctions that let people navigate. Before the words, there's a fog of competing assumptions. After, there are shapes you can see and move between. Questions become askable that weren't askable before — not because the answers were missing, but because nobody had drawn the lines.
Here's the thing I didn't expect. Writing this series — the act of naming the shapes, working out the vocabulary, putting it into public sentences — changed how I work. Not just what I say in rooms, but what I notice walking into them. The conversations that used to circle for an hour start resolving faster — not because I've gotten smarter, but because the vocabulary does work I don't have to do. It holds the distinctions while the room catches up.
I think this is what compounds. Not a shape — shapes move, drift, get outgrown. What compounds is the attunement. The capacity to notice when a room is stuck because everyone's in different products, and to stay in the friction long enough to name it. There's a word for what that attunement becomes, given enough time. I'll get to it.
A team with this vocabulary doesn't make fewer mistakes. They get unstuck faster. They argue about the right things — not past each other, but through the actual tension. They can hold competing shapes without collapsing into a single story prematurely. And when the world shifts — and it will shift — they recognize what's happening because they have words for it.
That's not a framework. It's a literacy.
I used to think shape work was something I did — a skill I brought to rooms. But writing this series taught me something I should have seen earlier.
Shape work isn't a role. It's a capacity — and not only a human one. A codebase resists a direction. A market pulls the product somewhere nobody planned. A prototype provokes a conversation nobody expected. The moment you assign shape work to a function — to product, to strategy, to the investor in the room — you've centralized a capacity that lives in the gaps between perspectives.
The most important insight about the product's shape is almost always already in the room. The real work isn't doing shape work for someone. It's spreading the vocabulary — and then trusting the room.
I want to be honest about what I don't know. Six essays in, and the discipline is still forming. I keep finding edges I haven't mapped — places where the vocabulary breaks, where a room teaches me something the writing hasn't caught up to yet.
And there's something the vocabulary itself can't escape: every act of naming is also an act of drawing lines. The taxonomy makes certain things visible and leaves others out. Some shapes don't fit the words I've found for them yet. Some never will.
I get it wrong a lot. I name the wrong shape. I push a tension the room isn't ready to hold. Shape work is not a method you master. It's a practice you keep showing up for — and the practice keeps changing because the shapes keep moving.
This series started with a claim: the most consequential decisions in frontier tech aren't about technology — they're about shape. I believe that more now than when I wrote it. But I'd add something.
The most consequential capacity isn't choosing the right shape. It's learning to notice the shapes you're already in — and to name what you notice, out loud, in the room where it matters. Not to master the shapes. To stay with them as they move.
That's the simplest move. It's also, I think, the one that compounds.
If you've read this far — through the shapes, the tensions, the rooms, the drift — here's what I'd leave you with.
Next time you're in a conversation that won't resolve, try this. Don't argue harder. Don't build something. Just name the gap. Say: I think we're in different shapes right now. Say: you're talking about what the product could be, and she's talking about what it is today, and neither of you is wrong.
See what happens.