2010: The year of the products + a new way of working
37signals.com
37signals.com
For every person you bring on, you're going to feel compelled to 'do more' because surely you don't want an employee sitting idle (even if you only do work for 37 hours in a week). And as you try to ensure no one sits idle, you start to introduces ideas about timelines, deadlines, iterations -- all of which have organically grown in software companies first, and then became institutionalized.
One big difference is that they are advocates of "a new way of working." Also, they are being open about it and discussing and sharing their ideas with the world.
If it fails, so be it. If it succeeds (or more likely, some variation of it succeeds), then we're all the better off for it.
A good number of small companies work the "getting real" way, if not overtly, at least by default. As companies grow however, they start to change. One of the most significant part of this change is the formalization of aspects of business.
37Signals is the first company I've seen to adamantly adhere to small company principles, not only embracing them, but expanding them into mantras and guiding principles.
Now that they're growing it's going to be interesting to see how well they can stick to their original ideas and how much they adapt into methods that are more similar to what other companies do.
The one thing they have going for them is that they're not afraid to try new things. I suppose we'll all just have to watch from a far to see how it all turns out.
It might mean polishing up an existing feature. Redesigning how something works. Making this or that easier than it was before.
There's endless room for improvement in our products. We hope to produce a steady stream of those improvements this year.
I expect the ideas behind this direction aren't being handed down by Jason and David from on high, but rather came from employee feedback. They're probably still small enough to test out some of these ideas without doing damage, so I'm interested to see what comes out of it and what modifications they make and what we can learn from this.
I think we made it 3 months before it collapsed due to conflicting outside schedule pressure I couldn't control.
This is going to hurt. Akio Morita ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Morita used this method on his design teams to build the first Camrecorder. [0] The idea behind this was to build a better product. The teams despised him for continually breaking them up.
[0] Sony, "Betamovie Beta" http://www.thehistoryof.net/the-history-of-camcorders.html
The 37s approach sounds like a formal structure culled from bits and pieces of Scrum and the always-unfortunately-named Extreme Programming.
It happens to work, usually providing a steady stream of warm fuzzies.