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September 17, 2008
Jason Fried: Things We've Learned at 37signals
I'm at NYC Web 2.0 Expo listening to Jason Fried, president and founder of 37signals, talking about things they've learned.
- Don't do specifications or projections: They lead to lots of complications, confusion, implicit expectations.
- Decisions are temporary: Recently went to a 4-day work week, are paying for employee's personal interests, giving everyone a credit card. Got hammered in comments when they announced it on their blog. It works for now, but they might change it later. Don't get too caught up in making decisions that could get changed if they don't work out.
- Red flag words - "need, can't easy, everyone, nobody" are words that indicate something more. If you're seeing these come up in conversation think about the reality of what is going on.
- Interruption is the enemy of productivity: We've traded in the work day for the work moment. We only get a few minutes here or there, maybe an hour. A fragmented day is not a productive day. Stop interrupting each other.
- Focus on what doesn't change: Find out things that matter today and will matter 10 years from now (ie, people will always want speed and ease of use, good customer service). Don't spend your time and energy in the technology, or trends of now.
- Worrying about things that don't matter yet: the longer it takes to develop something the less likely you'll be to launch
- Underdoing: Build the simpler, less feature-packed version.
- Always ask questions: Why are we doing this? What problem are we solving? Is this actually useful? Are we adding value? Is this piece of information important and helpful to provide? Is there an easier way?
- Give up on hard problems: There is an abundance of problems that are easy to solve. Leave the really hard problems to your competitors.
- Work less: The industry is filled with overworked folks. If you work people less, you get better production. 37signals went to a 32-hour work week. If you cut time out, people focus better.
Q/A
Their proposals went from huge things to one or two pages, because they found that most clients just wanted to see how long it would take and how much it would cost.
Jason is really glad to be out of the client services business. In design/development clients don't really respect the work of the consultants.
37signals only hires when it hurts. They only replace jobs they are already doing. Tend to hire folks they've worked with before, have seen their code and how they work in the open source world. They try folks out, give a 30-day contract to see if they fit in the culture.
Multi-tasking is over rated. Try to focus on one thing at a time. They had a period where they tried to have all employees focus on a single product, but it wasn't practical.
When it comes to design, they don't have a specific way that employees must work. Jason likes to do sharpie on paper, and then goes straight to HTML so you can start to see it in action.
Posted by mike at September 17, 2008 10:11 AM