A Basecamp-native feature (37signals) for mapping project progress along a hill shape — uphill, over the top, downhill — instead of a linear percentage. Built on the premise that work isn't uniform: the first half of a project is dominated by unknowns, and only after the team gets over the hill on the hard problem does the rest become straightforward execution.
Fried argues figures like '25% done,' '80% done,' '90% done' are meaningless without knowing what's known vs. unknown, because the one task left could be the hardest, least-understood part of the whole project — a project could sit at '90%' and still be facing its single biggest unknown. The right way to measure a project is by what's known and unknown — 'not undone and not done' — since that's where real confidence about the outcome comes from, not from a count of finished tasks.
Hill Charts are the tracking counterpart to Shaping the Work, Then Team-Led Discovery (37signals): shaping produces the malleable starting clay, and hill charts show whether the team has found its final shape yet.
Related: Roadmaps as False Control, Predictive Indicators.
If a team is still stuck at the top of the hill — big unknowns unresolved — with little time left before a deadline, Fried calls that a dangerous position ("you're in deep deep [trouble]"). This is the practical payoff of tracking known/unknown instead of percent-complete: a project can look far along by task count while the single largest unknown is still unresolved, and that unknown surfacing late — not the percentage remaining — is the actual risk.