Ryan Singer explains the unique internal operating conditions at 37signals (Basecamp) that distinguish it from typical software companies.
Insight
Singer: Whole project ownership drives much higher engagement than Scrum tickets
“Instead, we want to have a whole idea, give it to a team. So they see the whole, they really understand it. Right. And then they can come up with their tasks and they can figure out how to track that and break it into pieces so they can actually take more resp…”
Insight
Singer: Product teams do not need quarterly alignment if shipping consistently
“The other thing I've seen is when the team is just continuously delivering meaningful things, it doesn't have to line up. Because from the executive level, if you are CPO or CTO, or I mean, in these bigger cases, it's more like, you know, VP in some area, but …”
Insight
Singer: Being a feature factory is healthier than being unable to ship
“The thing is that, like, I would say if you have a feature factory, meaning you're continually cranking out features, you're probably quite healthy. All you need to do is feed a different input to the beginning of the factory, right? What most teams are strugg…”
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Singer: Basecamp had no sales or marketing orgs competing for engineering time
“Imagine you have no sales org. You have no marketing. That all of sales, sales, selling and marketing is happening by the unicorn founders. So it means that there isn't contention for engineering time, that there isn't kind of like all these different sources …”
Insight
Singer: Six weeks is the maximum horizon for reliable product planning
“We found that six weeks is kind of the maximum that we can see into the future where we could actually say like, how do we work backward and figure out something we could build in that six weeks and really land it, you know?”
Insight
Singer: Two weeks is rarely enough to build substantial product features
“When it comes to feature development or, you know, building something that's going to be needy enough to sell, you know, then there's very few things that are going to be a substantial value add to a product that you can do in two weeks.”