This article was taken from the April issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Create small teams to build products fast
As a small company -- it employs just 16 people in nine locations over three countries -- 37signals has, by necessity, to be a tight operation with great communication. It's appropriate, then, that its reputation as the pioneer of a new philosophy of software development comes from the release of project management tools.
Formed in Chicago in 1999 by current CEO Jason Fried and two others, 37signals started as an ordinary, if very good, web design shop. In 2004, however, the company released a web application called Basecamp.
This browser-based project-management tool, which remains the company's main product, came from an internal system the company was using to communicate with its clients. The sites they were making were great, the customers said, and this management tool?
We'll have that too. In both the design and the technology, Basecamp was stunning. Doing less, but doing it really well, the application and its siblings - such as Highrise, a customer relationship tool -- inspired a generation of application building and provided tools for thousands of small start-ups and other businesses.
"Basecamp really helped us communicate in the early days of our business when we had collaborators both in London and in Italy and needed to share what everyone was up to," says Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, co-founder of design studio Tinker.it! "It allowed us to be on the same page with the way projects were going, edit proposals for clients and share files."
In 2006, 37signals released a book about its philosophy.
Getting Real, which is available online for free, recommends simplicity above all else. The message: small teams, working on manageable systems, with fewer features mean that applications are better, quicker to market, and faster to improve.
Moreover, it recommends that the best way to plan your ideas is to build them first. "The only real way to determine whether something's worth doing is actually to do it," explains Fried, 35. "When you sit down to plan something out, you typically make it bigger than it needs to be." Other things -- offices, business stationery -- can come later.
The company itself embodies the philosophy: its Campfire chatroom application was built because most of its employees work from home, hundreds of miles from each other. Fried says it means fewer interruptions in the day: "The common thread is the product -- not the office politics or meetings." The company is defined by its output, not by its headquarters. Its latest product, Answers, a customer-service product released in January this year, was built in two weeks flat. "It serves its purpose very well," Fried says. "In most companies they would have spent a month or two just thinking about it. We just said, let's build this thing."
In March, 37signals releases Rework (Vermillion, £10.99), what it has learned from software development and its own growth, and turns these lessons into general business advice. Simple, really.
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D'O
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
