The SHAPE Exercise
Five questions to work through before you scale what worked.
The SHAPE Exercise
Five questions to work through before you scale what worked
Once a prompt or workflow works, the temptation is to roll it out everywhere at once. SHAPE is the thinking exercise for that moment: sit with the five questions below, answer them honestly, and you'll know whether you're ready to scale — or what's missing.
Situation
Assess current state honestly before changing anything
Prevents bad assumptions and underestimated complexity
Hypothesis
Define measurable success criteria upfront
Prevents unmeasurable goals and drifting pilots
Action
Execute systematic pilots with clear decision frameworks
Prevents analysis paralysis and poor tool selection
Process
Scale what works through systematic phases
Prevents scaling disasters and complexity creep
Evaluation
Measure continuously and iterate based on evidence
Prevents stagnation and sunk cost bias
When a prompt becomes a process.
PAST helps you think clearly. The Prompter helps you build. SHAPE helps you scale. A prompt that works for you is a draft of a process that could work for your team — but only if the situation, the success criteria, and the rollout are as deliberate as the prompt was. SHAPE is how you decide, before the rollout, whether it deserves one.