Jason Fried, CEO, Basecamp
Since Basecamp was founded in 1999, it has pioneered a different way of doing things, a different way of working, a different approach to doing business. Started with four people, today Basecamp has about 50 employees across 32 different cities across the world. Everyone at Basecamp is free to live and work wherever they want.
This talk is about dog-fooding. Getting an opportunity to see how a company like Basecamp is run, using Basecamp, (other project management tools are available as Jason freely said), was a great opportunity for attendees to see inside the workings of a company that chooses to do things differently. It is a fascinating insight into the inner workings of a company recognized by Forbes this year as one ofĀ America’s 25 best small companiesĀ – Small Giants, companies that value greatness over growth.
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The Q&A session is also exceptionally interesting and we let the session run on slightly longer than a normal keynote as it was the final talk of the conference and people had too much to ask.
Note, to protect confidentiality, the information shown on screen in this talk, which involved JasonĀ showing how processes and systems are built and managed at Basecamp, has been blurred on the screen at points in this video. Just another reason that you might want to consider attending a Business of Software Conference in person rather than relying on watching the videos.
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Transcript
Jason Fried:Ā Hey everybody! So, thanks for having me here today, itās great to be back! Make sure this is working here. So, I ā here we go!
Iāve always been interested in watching people work and seeing how they work and their technique. I found Adobe Illustrator and they said I used to hate product because I would try to make these shapes by using the tools I thought were available, the points and dots and handles, and I would hate Illustrator and thought thatās the only way to use Illustrator. Until one of my designers showed me how they use it and I watched it and watched them combine a couple circles at the intersection and have the shape. He didnāt have to have the shape, he combined other shapes and it combined into the shape that I wanted. And it sort of changed my feeling there becauseā¦It changed the way I think about learning because I had struggled with this thing for years and just thought itās the way to do it until I saw someone else do it and it changed my outlook on the product. The same thing is true for Photoshop, I didnāt really understand how to retouch photos really well ā I picked this and that tool do these things and I watched this photographer friend of mine retouch a photo and I saw things Iād never seen before and I understood how to use the tool and do something that I couldnāt do before only because I watched someone else do it.
How we work
So, I thought it would be cool today since Iām the last speaker to show you guys how we work at our company. Weāve been in business for 17 years and we study our company and iterate on it the same way we think about iterating on our products. Everyone in this room understands how to make software better. We iterate and watch people use it and make sure itās usable ā the same things apply to companies as well. You should think of your company as a product and if you do, you begin to look at the company a little bit differently. You start to ask yourself if our company usable? Are the people who work at our company, using it properly? We have a lot of resources here; do they even know whatās possible? How are we communicating, talking and making decisions? And when you start to look at your company like at a product, thereās a whole set of improvements you could make and I think your company should be your best product because itās the product that makes everything else you do.
So, I thought it would be interesting to show you how we work ā we obviously useĀ Basecamp, I will put our account on the screen and show you exactly how we work and communicate and talk, when we talk, why we talk and what we talk about, how we pitch ideas or figure out what everyone is doing in the company. I will show you the real stuff and I will ask you ā whatever is on the screen is real ā so there might be some confidential stuff that appears there and so donāt talk about that if you donāt mind but youāre free to talk about some ideas. So, I try to weave some philosophy in here as well so you understand why we do the things we do.
Before I show you, I want to hit one quick point which is we tried to design the way we work around the idea that 40 hours a week is enough. I as an employer and a business owner, I do not believe Iām entitled to anyoneās nights and weekends. Thatās their time, itās not mine. So, whatever we do as a company has to be able to be done in about 40 per week per person and I want as much of those 40 hours a week to be personal time for each person and not company time. Company time deletes time from people, I want everyone to have 40 hours a week of their own time, to do their own work as possible so some of the communication techniques and things I will show you revolve around that idea ā so thatās our defining thing, 40 hours is enough, I donāt want to push people beyond that and be tired. I wanna build a sustainable company with people who want to work at our company for long time and I think 40 hours a week is enough time to do that.
So, with that said, Iām going to show you how we work. Again, this is the real stuff so please donāt take pictures if you donāt mind. But weāll talk about it. First of all, quick background. We have about 50 people in the company, about 12 developers and Iām counting ā these are rough numbers cause these people do multiple things. 12 developers, 7 designers, I think 13 people in customer service, about 6-7 on operations like keeping the servers running that technical operations. We have ā Iām the CEO, we have a CTO, my business partner David, an COO and office manager and we have one data person and thatās roughly the 50 people that we have. 35 of those people live in 30 different cities around the world so weāre a very remote company ā weāre based in Chicago but even the 14 people from Chicago come to the office a few times a week. So, what Iām showing you is our office and how we work together. And Iām gonna go until you guys kick me off the stage so if you have questions blurt them out anytime cause I donāt think there will be time at the end. Just yell it out and I will hear you and go through it.
Structure
I wanna talk about structure first a little bit and then get into some very specific things. So, we break our company into three parts. We have the company which is represented up here ā this is what we call BCHQ, like our company project where we talk about everything company wide ā stuff thatās not project or team specific but company-wide announcements and I will show you a few of them as an example. Any social chatter we do happens in there, big picture dates for the company ā stuff that people need to know company wide, everyone has access to it.
We then have places for teams and teams have their own thing going on ā hereās a collection of teams that Iām part of. Weāve got a team for our Chicago office, we got the second one called JFDDRS, this is a small team of 3 people who discuss product strategy together. We have something called the Cās which is a place for our C level people which thereās only 3 of us. The small councils, the place where the team leads from each group in our company have a place to talk and that sort of thing. We have that set up and below this we have projects which is actual project work weāre doing. It might be a variety of things, these are all ongoing things weāre working on at any one time.
[Audience Question]Ā No ā so in our company, most people have access to everything but by default you can setup who has access to what. But in our case, we pretty much give everyone access to everything and people can choose if they donāt want to follow it or not, itās sort of a software mechanic thing. But yes, for example, like the Cās, right up here, thereās just 3 of us that have access to this one and the small council is about 8 people and most of them have access to everyone else. This is a version of Basecamp weāre releasing in a few weeks so some people that use it might think what the hell is that? Thatās what that is ā so youāre seeing something new as well. But we typically allow everyone to have access to everything.
This is a good question and let me get to the philosophy of this. We tried a bunch of different ways of doing this ā do we want to limit access to things people are specifically involved with? We found by user testing and observing our employeesā behaviour, people wanted access to everything but one thing that happened and I will show you how we solved this, is when people have access to everything they can be easily overwhelmed by everything thatās going on. And even deeper than that, there is this unusual expectation which surprised me, which was that people feel like they are obligated to know about whatās going on if they have access to something – I didnāt expect that. And so people were spending a lot of time on following a bunch of stuff that didnāt really involve them but they felt they needed to be up on it. And this is actually a really big problem today in a lot of companies ā my personal feeling is that companies ā one of the most important functions of a company should be ā if weāre talking about your company as a product let me put it in terms of a feature ā one of the most important features of a company should be to protect and preserve every employeeās time and attention. Companies today are clawing at everyoneās time and attention. At the end of the day and week, very few people actually had a lot of time to themselves and attention. And I break these two things up because time and attention are very different things. Time is a balloon, you got like 40 hours but you donāt have 40 hours of attention, you have a lot less. Attention is a small little nugget because your context shifting and all sort of things are going on so you have very little attention. So I think that itās important that the company thinks about the every persons time and affection and figures out ways to work in a way in which it does not claw at it, but instead gives it. So, I will show you some examples of that in a few. Actually Iāll jump in here and I will talk about something relates to that ā because I like to bounce around based on what people are asking. So, ask stuff and I will go in different directions.
One of the challenges we had when we allowed everyone to have access to everything was this expectation from people that they needed to follow everything to stay up on everything. And at any one time thereās 40 or 50 things happening in our company. Itās a lot of work to stay on top of that and itās the wrong work for people to be doing. But we also felt itās really important for people to know what everyone is doing. I feel that this is important for every employee in the company, to understand ā at a certain size of course weāre still at that scale where we can do this ā where everyone should know what everyone else is doing because it increases the respect across teams and across roles. Sometimes you will feel like youāre really busy and you wonder what heās doing, what does she do here? And this causes internal tension and some politics and I want to make sure that everyone knows what everyone is doing because when you donāt have clear information, people form their own information and create their own stories and oftentimes, these create anxiety and worry and people filling the gaps with things that arenāt true and this is bad. I think itās very important to be very clear about everything in the company ā I will talk about that in another couple examples.
So, what weāve decided to do is we had this feature in Basecamp and by the way, thereās a lot of products out there that exist that can do some of these things and other things. This isnāt a pitch for the product, Iām showing you what we use for work, but the ideas can be applied to a variety of other tools. Every day, in the company, I try to start here. Once a week, every Monday morning, everybody in the company is automatically asked a question ā Basecamp will automatically ask this question ā which is what will you be working on this week? And itās optional, but people respond and itās published back to the central place and people can go ā itās a log basically and you can go through it and read it. And this is everything thatās going on in the company basically this week hopefully. This is not about holding anybody accountable, this is not about saying you said youād do this but you didnāt. This is about exposing information to everyone in the company so they know whatās happening. Jay, our Android programmer, is working on some stuff. Jeff is doing our security infrastructure and performance and working on this stuff. Jeffrey and Dave is working on this ā Kristen who runs our support crew is training 2 new people and Lynn who is on marketing is doing this stuff. Some write bullet points and some longer things, some write a variety of things, it doesnāt really matter how they write it. But this is about exposing information to everybody in the company so no matter what role theyāre in, they share this information in one place.
Something that weāll talk about, I will show you some more, itās this idea that we believe very strongly in the idea of one place. If you want to protect peopleās time and attention, you have to make it easy to find what they need and make sure they know theyāre seeing the whole story. Something Iāve observed in our own company over the years ā we tweaked this thinking about the company as a product, is we have fragmented information and discussions. Some people were talking some stuff in a chat room, some under the to do items or some other ways or in a meeting. And while those particular moments are fine for the people who are talking about those things, they are bad for everybody else because you canāt get the whole picture or story, and when you donāt have it, you donāt know where the whole story is so you have to ask people. When you ask people for things, it claws at their time and attention because they now have to stop what theyāre doing and to answer your question about something else. And thereās a lot of dependencies that form when people donāt know where to find stuff. We are against dependencies at any level ā as much as possible, I want everyone to be able to work independently and slide past another. If youāre waiting on someone else for information thatās a bug in our company. If you have to ask somebody about what that is, itās a bug in the company. If some of the stories over here and over here, thatās a bug in our company and we want to solve that. I will show you some examples on how we want to keep everything in one place so that people can find it.
[Audience Question]Ā Yes, I will show you that. Remind me if I donāt, I will show you that in just a minute.
The other thing thatās important ā let me step to another thing quick and I can come back to that in a second. So, this is what will you be working on this week? Everyone in the company answers that and at the end of every day we ask everyone what you worked on today? And this is actually really important because what we used to do is the system would generate a report like hereās the to-do somebody checked off, the things someone commented on or somebody spoke. That paints the least human picture of anything, that is like just ā whatever you put in the system is what it knows. When peopleās days are far more complicated and interesting and colourful than what a system can tell you based on the inputs you put into the system. So, we ask people to write up their day ā some people write short bullets again, some people attach some screenshots of stuff theyāve worked on or seen. Some write long, long detailed, interesting articles about very specific problem they faced that day. Something that is not necessarily technically interesting to a lot of other people but itās a way to be exposed to what other people are doing and what they struggled with during their day.
So, this is Sam, who is one of our programmers and talking about stuff I donāt understand, but itās interesting. Eileen works and talking about fighting with fires and chatting with someone else and this is her write up of what she did in a given day. Anton is a bullet point guy so he likes to bullet point. Matthew likes to write stories. Jonas has bullet points, but expandable bullet points. Everyone has a different way of describing their day and itās awesome to read this because you really get a true sense of whatās happening in the company, without having to go follow a bunch of the things that are going on because this information comes to you in everyoneās own words every day. And you can choose to receive it, you can look at it and receive the email ā you can get it any way you want but itās a wonderful way to read up on whatās happening and check it out as you go. So, this is a different way of getting a sense of whatās happening in the company versus running technical reports or feeling like everyone has to follow everything all the time.
[Audience Question]Ā I heard your voice coming from over here ā no, itās not mandatory and about 65% of the company does it. Some donāt do it because their roles are a bit more the same every day like customer service but some people in customer service do a great job with this because they will say here is a difficult case I had today or hereās how I helped a customer today ā hereās something Iāve been hearing over and over and finally today I felt like I had to write it up because itās bugging me and things like that. Depends on the role but about 60-70% of the employees do this. Some do it a few times a week or donāt do it at all, totally fine! Again this is not about ever holding anyone accountable, itās about information and sharing.
[Audience Question] So, whenever they want. And thatās I think the really important point here, is that something we do and really feel very strongly in is asynchronous communication which ā the difference between it and real time is that asynchronous communication puts the pace on the receiver of the information. So, when something is published to Basecamp like this, itās not saying come look at it right now! Itās saying come look at it whenever you want! Thereās no response required here or immediate sense of I need to know everything, every moment. When I have a free time in my day and I can carve out some time for myself and want to check what everyone is working on, I can go and check this out. Or I can get this email at the end of the day, thereās a variety of ways to do that. Some people are more curious than others ā I like to read it a lot because I run the place and like to read whatās going on. Some people like to read it because they learn something new about something thatās going on in the company we hadnāt announced. This replaces the need to have a lot of meetings or all hands sort of things, letting everyone know what is going on in the company because this is letting know whatās going on in the company all the time, slowly, and itās a great way to not have to pull people away ā the stuff is here for anyone when they wish to check it out. As far as the percentage of people that consume it, I donāt really know it, specifically, but I also donāt care. Basically itās here for people and most people enjoy writing this up and look at it, as far as I understand.
Personal vs Company time
To your point about personal time and company time, this is personal time ā and one of the important things about this is itās optional and thatās the key. If itās optional itās personal time, if itās mandatory itās company time. Like for example, all meetings or Monday morning meetings, a lot of stand up meetings. If you have to attend, thatās company time. We donāt do any of those things, donāt have all hands meetings or stand up or meet in person hardly ever more than 3 people in a room. Because we do all that asynchronously and whatever it is we have to talk about, it doesnāt need everyoneās attention at the same time. People need to know about this stuff but if you find out about it at 4 in the afternoon or 1 itās fine or even tomorrow. Why does everyone need to know this on Monday morning at 9? Why do I need to steal peopleās time to tell them all at the same time? Very few good reasons for this unless you need to know the information at 9:01. So, most of what we do is asynchronous and because of that, I donāt believe most information needs to be disseminated at a point where everyone needs to know it at the same time and need to pull themselves away to receive it.
There are moments when thereās a crisis and we need to talk about it right now, but if thatās happening right now, thatās another bug in the company. There might be 1-2 emergencies a year, like we need to talk now. But most things donāt need to be discussed in real time. We do discuss other things in real time and we have a chat room here, where we talk about stuff, people are bitching about the iPhone and what people do in chatrooms. So, we have all that here too, that stuff exists, but this is ā thereās a distinction here between asynchronous and real time. For us, anything thatās important and when I say that, I mean itās something someone else needs to know about happens asynchronously and that we post something and you can look at it whenever youāre free to. Anything that doesnāt need to be seen by everyone else, a link or whatever, real time chat totally fine, but we donāt make decisions in chat rooms, calls in chat rooms or do any of that stuff because if you do things like that in chatrooms, youāre expected then to follow along all day to wait until something happens in that chatroom so you can jump in and participate which means you have to keep an eye out all day and wait for notifications to say this conversation is happening right now so stop what youāre doing and probably more important when it never is. So, we use chat for social release and for an occasional quick question or whatnot but we donāt use it for discussing work, for showing comps, getting feedback on things because it means that hey, do you need to stop what youāre doing and do what I want you to do instead? When that happens, dozens or 100s of times a day in an organisation, you have a very scattered organisation where peopleās days are put into smaller bits because they are being pulled away all day long when thereās an indication that thereās something wrong going on over here. And actually let me parlay that into the point about context.
Context
Context is really important to us ā let me talk about what that means. If Iām going to tell someone to check something out, Iāve got to tell them and give them enough information to decide whether or not they need to look at it right now. One of the problems with ā and we used to work with way and still have this in Basecamp here ā I will show you something youāre used to. People who work in chat based organisations will have something like this ā which is a series of rooms with some sort of indicator on the side, campfire and these things have rooms and channels and the reds on the right. The problem with this, is that I donāt know whatās behind this dot or number unless I go find out. The problem with that is because the topics or the rooms or channels are generally fairly broad, it can be one of many, many things. Some things might be ā they might need my attention and others not need it ā but I have to read, scroll back to see if thereās anything worth looking at or responding to which means I have to put my eye on that part of the screen and see if itās important and distracted.
So, the way ā one of the advantages to working in an asynchronous format is that this is taking cues from what is good about email. Email is bad about some things but thereās some great idea which is the idea of subjects. You look in your inbox and thereās subjects and they describe something in a way that is specific to the information and you can decide if you want to act on it or not. You canāt decide that if thereās a room with a number next to it because it could be one of many things. Iād be like calling 911 and saying thereās a fire and they are like where? Boston. Where in Boston? I donāt know, itās just in Boston. Thatās what happens when you work this way, is that there is information in Chicago, well what kind of information do I need to look at it now? Is it important? Does it matter? And Iām constantly being pulled away so what we tend to do is when you work asynchronously, and I will show you some examples, everything gets a title and a permanent place for that entire conversation and discussion and you can then look at it and decide whether or not itās something worth looking at.
For example, these are the things on the right, I havenāt checked my stuff since yesterday ā so this is the stuff Iām involved at some level and need to look at. So, I can take a minute to look at this and go like ā this information includes person, time, place, subject. And with that information I have contacts and can decide if itās something I should look at. So this I donāt care about now, this is a pitch. Weāre working on new product development right now so I might want to check that out later. And this is what Jay worked on yesterday and Andrew was inspired by something yesterday. Done! I didnāt have to read the content and figure out what those 54 unread were to decide if itās something I should have read. I can look at the subjects, time, place and location and have a sense of whether or not I should look at this. This is how you protect peopleās time and protection so they are not constantly being pulled away.
One of the other things I want to bring up about this which is an important point, people talk about context switching and chat primarily is a very context switching based tool for communicating ā the problem is that when you switch context without context, you end up in a place where youāre doing a lot of bouncing around to find out if itās worth bouncing. And thatās distracting and takes a lot of time. If you work this way and look at the amount of time youāre bouncing into something to see if itās worth looking that and record it, I bet you wouldnāt be surprised to see itās 40-50 times and thatās a bug in my opinion in your company if thatās how you have to find out if thereās something worth looking at.
[Audience Question]. Sure, so thatās a really good question for straddling it because we do both and the main reason is ā you show examples of why itās better. Let me show you one, for example. I bookmarked a couple things that we can talk about today so just a second please.
Iām going to go to this, this is a to-do item weāre working on in native UI for starting new Pings and the topic itself doesnāt matter and this is to do and the entire discussion about that particular piece of work is below that to do and context of the to do. I will scroll through this ā the whole story is in one place, across multiple days. When you see this and you ask yourself, and you ask someone, if you were new to this project and you had to get up to speed on what was going on with this. And you were using chat and were having conversations for one day about that was a handful of back and forth and then you stopped and the next day there was another one. There were a bunch of other conversations happening in the meantime. How would anyone get up to speed that way? Were they expected to read back 100s of line and parse it all and piece it all together? Itās much better to have one place where everyone is confident ā thereās a central source of truth, where the only story is this story and thatās the whole story.
For example, hereās the to-do and this is Jasonās ā he is one of our designers taking a 1st stab at the interface and sort of sharing a few screenshots of this idea he has ā and then Jamie Hanson whoās a designer of the Android app has some feedback, I should actually put the date here. So, you can see this started on January 4th, this to-do was created on the 13th he posted this design and thereās a bunch of back and forth ā over time I will show you all the way down to the bottom here. Now weāre on July 18th so 5 days have gone by. 15th ā February 1st, thatās the whole story. So, the whole story about this feature was about a month long of discussion, over time not in real-time. And the whole story is here ā if I asked you to go back to the tool and whatever you guys used for chat slack and look at a particular ā by the way this is the same weakness in Basecamp, a problem with the medium, the idea of it – and scroll back and go piece together the story of this interface design it would be very hard to do that and itād be very likely that you would never actually know if youāre done looking for stuff. So, you can keep scrolling back and find a segment of a discussion or conversation and then like well how do I know thatās all? Did we talk about that 2 months ago also or 3 weeks ago? You donāt ever know, so you end up repeating yourself a lot and thereās a lot of double work thatās done in these rooms because you donāt know if itās been discussed before and thereās no one place to go find the information because itās scattered amongst other conversations that are happening. Itās a very disorganised way to work ā some people are ok with that, Iām not.
The reason Iām not ok with that is because everyone knows their own mess, but you donāt know someone elseās mess. Itās like I know my sh*tty messy desk, I know where everything is on it. If I ask you to go find my keys, youād be like I have no idea where your keys are. But I know where they are because I know my mess. Bbut when youāre working in groups you have an organised structure thatās predictable and people know where to go to find something and when they hit that, they can see the whole story. So, this is a long answer but when you show things like this to people, they start to understand that it makes their job easier to communicate this way, it also reduces the ā it increases patience in the organisation realising people donāt need to respond to everything instantly and this conversation that happened over a month, nothing here needed to be dealt with immediately. It can be dealt with over time, let me think about it, I will explore it and see how it goes. I will take my time and discuss it over time. Thereās things that need to be discussed immediately but very few things should be that way I believe.
[Audience Question]Ā Sure! Great question! If itās only 2 people working on something, that might be ok but if thereās 3-4 people working on something, then they were privy to the phone call and thereās information thatās been shared and backstory people donāt know about and youāll have to repeat that conversation to someone else down the road when they donāt understand something is missing from the whole story. The other thing is you can try to scribe the call if you want, we donāt do that, we do use Skype from time to time and video conference with 2 people to look at some stuff together, but the bigger thing is you have to think longer term about is, which is that at that very moment, that phone call might have been useful and sometimes it is and we use the phone. But you have a gap in the overall record of information in the story so if someone new comes into the project or you want to reference a decision that you made and you want to look back at something and go why did we do it that way? Someone is like we should change it this way. We had this discussion before so let me point to it so you can look at it and see why we got to this conclusion. And itās just good to have things documented, I think, and it doesnāt mean that the phone and video and personal meetings are useful and they are useful but thereās a significant cost to those as well so everything has its cost and you gotta play those costs off one another and decide whatās useful in this case ā this was a prototype idea, it can go a little bit slower because weāre bouncing some ideas back and forward and it was better to be discussed this way and written out so everyone could be a part of this conversation.
[Audience Question]Ā Sure! We make a decision by posting a message, let me show you how that works. So, let me show you actually a good example of this. Let me think back on a good ā ok! So, let me show you something related to that and then I will find this other thing for you cause I think this other thing might show up and if it doesnāt, I will come back to that. Basically, we post messages and messages are sort of the moments when we describe something completely, thoroughly and fully, so let me show you an example here.
Before I show you, let me give you some back story ā last year we had about 6 people leave the company in a year which was very rare for us. We have very high retention rates over the past 17 years prior to last year, fewer than 10 people have left the company who worked with us for more than a year. So, really high retention rates, very unusual 5-6 people leave in a given year and I was starting to hear that people were concerned about this and were worried. They were like whatās going on? Why is everybody leaving? And when these people left, we made a bit of an announcement letting the people know they left, but we didnāt tell them exactly why. What happens is when you donāt tell people exactly why, something happens they make up their own stories and things get worse and people have anxiety on their minds and it takes a piece of their retention and in some cases itās even bad when people ā Iāve heard other organisations like someone will get fired and people will start thinking about looking for a new job because like am I next? People have all these thoughts and you gotta clear the air pretty quickly about stuff like that, otherwise it gets really bad.
So, this is an example of an announcement I made and I will show you decisions also in a second. I just got to remember a good example for that. This is a post I put up and itās set up to everybody in the company that I wrote up, explaining that I understand, Iāve heard some peopleās concerns, that some people left the company ā weāve had historically low turnover, whatās going on? So I explained how talking about people leaving is delicate cause sometimes itās personal thing or whatever but I will go through every single one of these 6 people and I wonāt say this out loud cause itās recorded, you guys can see names. Just Iām showing you the real thing, hopefully we donāt show the screen when the video is up. I went through each person and explained exactly why they are no longer here. Some people ā and Iām gonna just scroll through this quickly so we donāt talk personally about anybody but some people had reached sort of the end of their skill level and they wanted to do something new somewhere else. Some people got a new job somewhere else and we wished them well, other people were fired. I had to let them go and I just spelled this out completely and told the whole story, exactly what happened for each person and now the air is cleared and now what happens is ā this is a difficult thing to write up and a lot of companies are like what happened to Bob? I donāt know, we donāt talk about Bob anymore [laughing] thing is people are talking about Bob.
Thatās the thing, the company doesnāt want to talk about him, everyone else is talking about him. So, itās important for the company to speak up and explain these things so we write this up and this is the length to which we write things up ā we write things up completely so everyone understands the story so thereās no follow-up questions required. They often lead to extra time spent on things thatās unnecessary for clearing the first place so we take time to think this stuff ā if I would write it in an email, we donāt use email ā if I would write it up in email, what would happen was it would have gone out but future employees who came in who were curious about this ā cause thereās folklore in companies ā what happened ā they wouldnāt have had to forward ā itās a shitty way to work.
So, this is in a permanent place in this Basecamp project and then down below we have comments and these comments came in a bit over time and people saying thank you for this, I appreciate it and I was definitely feeling some anxiety about this. And thereās discussion about this and itās not just the initial announcement, itās about the follow up conversation that happens about this where people can say thank you for sharing that, I was a bit nervous I appreciate it. Other people said hey, am I the only one who wasnāt nervous about this? And so people talked about that and we just got it all in the open and now thereās a complete full history of that entire conversation from the initial announcement to all the feedback that came in about it in one place, screen and page which I can always reference later, I can point to someone later, if this stuff was scattered in a lot of places youād never have this thing anymore. Youād have a bunch of small things but I really think itās something Iāve seen over the years of working with people, having a central source of truth that everyone can refer back to where the whole story lives is one of the most useful ways to get people on the same page about stuff. Now and later. So, thatās how this works, let me show you a decision now. I have to find it because Iām trying to think about what it was even called actually let me show you a pitch first cause thatās easier to show you and then I will get to the decision thing again.
Pitching ideas
So, let me show you how we pitch ideas internally. How am I doing on time? Good, I have 15 minutes, thatās good. Actually, let me go to this one here. So this is our little product strategy team here and let me go ā Iām using someone elseās laptop so Iām not used to have to click on the button, I have the tap thing on mine. Pitches, and I wanna go to this.
Ok, so when we pitch ideas, when we have a fully formed idea we want to share with the whole company ā this can come from anybody, I can show you other examples of this ā anyone is allowed to pitch ideas. The only rule is you have to think it through and write it up fully. We donāt present ideas in person, at meetings. We write ideas up completely to what I call force the floor and that is that when people have the floor, they have everyoneās attention and they cannot be interrupted while they are talking. And the reason this is important itās because I want people to be a little absorbed in the whole story. Let me show you an example to the depth we go to to pitch a simple idea. So, this is like how long a pitch is, it includes sketches, drawings and maybe some interface mock-ups. This is how we go through an idea to pitch it to one another. It has to be at this level of detail, it can be short, tiny, quick and random ideas and they can be shared amongst people. But when you put an idea forth that we should do, the expectation is that you saw it through and the whole story.
So, we go ā we start at the beginning like the backstory, why would I want to pitch this idea? What are the problems? Iāve talked to some people hereās what they say ā Ryan is particularly good at this so this is a bit more in detail than most but ā and itās presented this way in one place and then below this we can follow up and I can show you an example here. So, in some cases, to get back to your phone call thing, I will say hey, letās review this together! So this is when Ryan and I would sit down together and talk it through and then the reason why itās because itās only 2-3 people involved in this particular thing so we can kind of do that and the only 2-3 people that will ever see this in this form will be the 2-3 of us. If this idea makes our little battle, then we will present it to the whole company, in a way they can see it. So, right now itās sort of ok to riff on this together a bit. David who happens to live in Spain, isnāt where Ryan and I are together in Chicago. So, David wrote his response up in detail and then some additional consideration. And then some more back and forth and now thereās a history and what he had to say. So when Ryan and I talk about it, we can incorporate his ideas and we wrote a second pitch based on what we thought about it ā anything that if itās a decision, an announcement, a pitch, anything like that, it’s always written up in long form the same way, so it has a permanent home. And all the follow up commentary about it can be attached to the thing itself. So, thatās how we do things like that.
Another example of this would be ā let me jump back to this one here. I will show you another example of this with another level of ā internet is a bit slow here. This idea of heartbeats ā so let me take a look and make sure thereās nothing too sensitive in here. So, yeah, all right! So once ā I talked about at the beginning of every week, everyone writes what they would be doing this week. At the end of the day, they write up what they did and this is all automated. Basecamp asks each person so nobody has to remember to do this. If you want answers from people, you have to ask questions and if a system asks a question, itās a process. If a persons does, itās nagging. Ok? So when the system does it, this is just what we do. If I had to ask a direct report every day and write up ā I would nag them and they would hate me. So, itās different ways to approach this and depending on who is doing it itās different. We ask once a week what do you plan on working on, once a day what did you work on and then once a month every team lead writes up a summary of the general work that the team has been doing over that month and I will show you a couple examples of this.
This is Noah, who is our data guy, he is a team of one, this is sort of his write up and heās linked into a bunch of things heās written up. This is one of the beautiful things about having homes for things is you can reference them ā if you were to put a bunch of stuff in a bunch of places thatās difficult to reference or the things that are referenceable are chunks of the whole story, itās difficult to refer to something later. This is like the basic beauty of URLs and links and permalinks and this is so important to be able to reference the whole story. If I click these things, I can have the whole story and not parse it out.
This is our customer service team. Kristen who runs our customer service, she wrote a heartbeat about whatās been happening in the past month in support for everybody. This goes out to everybody and people can chime in down below. This is actually an interesting example, she is announcing she hired 2 people, Janice and Esther and so down below in the comments we have a tradition internally ā whenever a new hire is mentioned, people always say welcome to the new hire in the comments section so that we can point that new hire to this page later and they can feel really good about joining the company because everyone welcomed them in the first day. Now weāre remote, if we were local, you could just walk up in the office and everyone says hello, we donāt have that. So, this is our way of doing that. Yes [Audience Question] letās go back to it! Sure!
So, thereās a project called data, everyone in the company has access to it. Hopefully youāre not seeing anything ā doesnāt matter, I trust everybody [laughing] so everyone has access to this project called data and thereās to-do lists and you can click these ā you can rename them ā and thereās a list on the top called requests. I will show you all of them. On this list, these are the 4 open requests people made and are curious. How many BC3 events were created ā different people in the company have questions about stuff, theyāre doing product development or marketing and they want to know something and they canāt find it themselves and they put it here and this is a collection of all of the requests and whatās really cool is because again, everything is in one place, hereās the request for something ā I donāt know what this is but whatever [laughing] and not only is this the to-do, but this is the whole conversation back and forth between Mercedes who asked about it and Noah who did it and follow up and examples and the whole thing and now thereās a piece of history and information. If anyone else wants to know this, itās right here. Not only the request but the follow up and the conversation that happened after that. If this would happen in person on the phone, that knowledge itās lost, gone.
If this would have happened in a chat room, it doesnāt have a label, a thing so you donāt know itās there and canāt get back to it. Now I can get back to these things so itās interesting to look through this stuff before you make a request – what percentage of customers are convert to paid within 40 hours of trials? Iām actually curious about that myself- about 43% set up their first paid Basecamp within 48 hours. Of all the customers this is the chart, I will scroll by it quick. Whatever, doesnāt matter. This is that! So like now thatās there I donāt have to ask him again and itās all there, in the data project, on the to-do list.
Thereās also things that Noah writes up regularly ā by the way this is a little internal thing, you guys wouldnāt see that. These are all the different announcements Noah makes to the whole company about data findings that he thinks are interesting and they are all here and thereās a whole history of everything. Again, if this stuff was said in a meeting itās gone, unless you were there. If you were in a chatroom, itās gone unless you happen to find it later. Itās all here organised on the record and if people have follow up questions, they can post these below. This is like a review he went to a conference and posted it here. He loves writing clearly. And a bunch of follow ups and pictures and whatever the experience, put it all here, that sort of thing so thatās how that works.
Another really cool thing that he does on a daily basis is this thing called chart of the day. And what Noah does, this is an interesting finding around data. Noah used to share a lot of data and he realised no one could absorb it all at once so something he does every day and 256 days in a row heās done this. So itās workdays and every day he posted a different chart to Basecamp for everyone to see and they are all different things. The total number of emails generated per minute by all our apps combined over the course of the day, this is in millions ā I donāt know what it is. Anyway, then he has some commentary below and you can see that we send every hour reminders and 3.5 to 4 million emails per workday across all our apps.
Why most start-ups occur the first time someone visits Basecamp.com. Thereās a very long tale, about 4% of people sign up more than 90 days after their first visit so he posted that. Sometimes he would post ā Serena Williams is the greatest player tennis of all time. It all lives here and itās cool because these things are ā let me see if I can find a good example ā live here, you can follow up with them, they all have their own place but you can follow up in the comments section below and follow up on the chart ā Iām trying to see if thereās a particularly interesting one with some threads where people can have some really interesting insights and discussions about the data they wouldnāt have seen cause they wouldnāt have bumped into it. We did this customer survey and someone did like a word count of all the responses that came in and there was some feedback about that. Anyway, there are some moment where discussions can be interesting. Hereās 7 discussions,
[Audience Question] yeah, great question! With new hires we typically sort of work them into it, giving them initially access to things they will be working on so they can get to see how it works and the patterns and then we slowly reveal more. Everyone is assigned a buddy from the company who works in other departments and they show them around and get them acclimated and how things are going. Sometimes they will send them some greatest hits ā these are some important philosophical decisions weāve made or an important decision weāve made or whatever it is and read up on these because this is a good primer to how we approach things and these things. How are we doing on time?
Baseline rules
[Audience Question]Ā thatās a good question. First of all, one of the prerequisites for working at Basecamp is that youāre a good writer. It doesnāt mean that youāre confident in writing, but that you can write and that when you applied for the job it was clear you could express yourself clearly. Thereās a wonderful article that came out in Harvard business review about how bad writing contributes to something like 40% of inefficiencies in companies for people have to repeat themselves and re-explain stuff, this is why a lot of meetings have to happen again. Like you have a meeting, people didnāt understand it, gotta have it again, people canāt even communicate clearly. Weāre careful about that when we hire people and want to make sure everyone is capable of writing well. Doesnāt mean theyāre comfortable writing things, but they are capable.
The second thing is that practice is what makes you better. So, this is another one of the reasons why we ask people to write up what theyāre working on every day because itās a really good exercise in writing and explaining yourself and being clear about things and if people have follow-up questions, you get a sense of what was unclear and you get better and better at that over time. We also encourage people to write on our blog, signal versus noise and Iām like an editor, someone goes like I wanna post this, what do you think? Itās a variety of things but they have to initially be good at writing. And itās like people think well itās obvious to think that if you wanna hire a designer they should be a good designer, right? No one would question that ā I think writing is a pre-requisite for every job to be able to explain yourself clearly to other people this way ā some people are only good at explaining themselves in person and thatās a problem for us because weāre remote primarily and second of all, because I really think that if most communication in a company is written anyway in one form or another. And if you canāt explain yourself then itās very difficult to work with someone like that. So, thatās the rules basically, baseline rules for us.
[Audience Question]Ā great question! Some stuff is very clear very quickly- you look at someoneās cover letter and itās like I have no idea what they do, I donāt understand anything, theyāre out. I donāt care theyāre the best developer or designer in the world, if they canāt communicate clearly, they canāt work with other people. So, we have to all work together so if you canāt communicate you canāt work for us basically. Some people we pay really close attention to cause the writing is fantastic and their skills are good but we know we can make those better but they have the fundamental thing, they know how to explain themselves. When we hire customer service people we do writing exercises to make sure they can write. We will ask them and explain to somebody who doesnāt know what bread, peanut butter and jelly is how to make a sandwich. I wanna see how they explain that process, cause thatās like software is for a lot of people. Someone uses it and I donāt understand how this works at all, so it’s similar.
So, we do these things occasionally for people who are public facing with their writing like customer service but internally you can tell quickly ā for designers, when we hire them, when we limit or filter the finalists down to 5 ā letās say we have 5 potential candidates, we give them all one project for one week to do, we pay them $1500 for that week to do a real project ā they all do the same project independently and part of the project is to explain the thinking behind it, I donāt want to see just the design and thatās a great place to figure out, can this person really get to the point and explain themselves clearly? Thatās how we do that.
[Audience Question]. Weāve pretty much always railed against meetings, I find them to be incredibly inefficient ways to spend your time, primarily because it requires schedule coordination, weāve all been through that ā if it’s a standing meeting, it means your day is just 1 hour shorter no matter what basically. And if that scheduled meeting is now at the beginning of the day or later in the day now your day is broken into 2 pieces and itās not like youāre gonna start something really interesting and creative 30 minutes before it starts cause you know you will have to stop. So, these 1 hour meetings, they bleed out so weāre careful about that. Thatās not to say we donāt meet in person, we do occasionally, but very rarely are there more than 3 people in a room together. I find 3 people is enough for everything ā most of our project work, 3 people. 2 programmers and one designer basically, works on every feature we do, thatās the maximum people working on it together, thatās it. Because I find thatās the right number here to make sure people can communicate clearly without having to coordinate a bunch of schedules and create confusion so it seems like the right number. Davidās in Spain or whatever, we do Skype occasionally when we need to do a bit of video conferencing for whatever reason. But for the most part, almost all of our communication thatās important is written so we can communicate in a way thatās on the record and itās sort of permanent in a place where we can refer to it later so we know what we talked about.
[Audience Question]Ā Well this is an example of ā I donāt know if the internet is slow and weāre running on a beta server so itās possible that the server is extremely slow, I apologise for ā [laughing] rails are slow, nice! You got me on that one!
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