Figuring out what your company is all about
joelonsoftware.com
joelonsoftware.com
My uninformed prediction of what's next: a hosted CI service like CruiseControl or TeamCity, both of which are useful (I would say indispensable) but can be intimidating to set up and start using.
Maybe I'm a little old fashioned, but I still have a tough time understanding any goal != "maximizing our customers' success".
I once went to a sales seminar for technical people and we had to introduce ourselves and describe what our companies did. The first 15 people described their products. Then on my turn, I said something like, "We provide our customers tools to help them succeed." The instructor remarked that I was the only one who mentioned "customers" in his introduction. I didn't even think about it at the time; that's just the way I was trained.
It took almost ten years, but I think we finally got the mission for the next ten nailed.
Good for you, Joel. In your business, I imagine it's a fine line between an employee and a customer because they're both programmers. I would expect that sooner or later, focus must revert to the customer.
That seems like an overly general phrase. Using the generic 'customer' seems like a cop-out, since it feels like you haven't really asked yourself which market you're making your product for. "Help them succeed" implies to me that you haven't really figured out the tangible benefit to the customer, which in turn means that you're in a really weak sales position.
Let's say you worked for a company making pie chart software. That phrase could apply, or something more specific like "We provide middle-managers with pie chart software to help them impress their bosses".
A good sales pitch follows directly from an understanding of who you're selling to, what they want, and how your product gives it to them.
If you don't attract top talent, you're not going to have great anything.
The new goal, helping customers be awesome, is directly related to maximising customer success - no?
Almost every software job in the city was terrible.
You had a choice of which kind of terrible.
Want to wear a suit and work long hours under crummy
conditions? Take a job at a bank.
It's totally irrational but I get that gut feeling a lot with him. Am I the only one? Any other ideas why?
but, its _too_ nice : I need the anarchy of a startup.
The atomic moments of xen calm are appreciated more against a backdrop of reality-chaos-screaming-towards-outrageously-impossible-product-deadline.
There's also a lack of substance to much of his writing. Aeron chairs are what makes FogBuz great? Really? That's a pretty low bar to match. To me, a great company has purpose, vision, and smart-but-zero-ego people who enjoy working together to produce something that will actually make a difference in the world. Give me those things and I'll sit on a milk crate.
() (And, for the record, I live in NYC myself and think it's a pretty awesome city.)