

A New Way of Working: A Two-Month Recap - adamhowell
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2185-a-new-way-of-working-a-two-month-recap

======
gr366
It's fascinating to watch 37signals adapt as it becomes a _slightly_ larger
company. I think the number of features accomplished is pretty impressive for
it being their first attempt at this new way of working. Across multiple
products, no less.

My first reaction to a lot of their learnings was "Duh", but of course I've
only learned a number of those lessons after several years working with agile
dev teams. Credit to them for sharing all of this.

------
lotharbot
I remember in college always being hammered with "break down problems into
appropriately sized, manageable chunks." This looks like a great approach to
it. Focus on a specific issue for a 2-week block, design-develop-deploy, and
move on.

Key quote: "Late nights are a sign of scope failure. Hero mode is a sign of
scope failure." Bingo. If you're regularly going into those modes, it means
the problems weren't broken down into right-sized pieces.

------
rubyrescue
I thought 37s did 4-day weeks? did they stop that practice?

~~~
adamhowell
That's one of the first things I wondered while reading this.

Jason, care to comment if you see this/get a chance?

~~~
jasonfried
We're doing 4-day weeks in the summer. They work better there since a good
portion of the company lives in cold-weather climates. The extra day was often
used for working, and when it wasn't it made the week feel like 3.5 day weeks.
So we're starting to think of it as summer vacation every work week.

That's the current idea. We're ever-chaging so we'll see how it all shakes
out.

------
jules
Is programming twice as much work as designing? (2 programmers, 1 designer).

What would change if programming was 4x faster than it is now (e.g. because of
imaginary better tools)? Would you do 2 designers with 1 programmer? Could you
offload some of the designer work to programmers?

~~~
maurycy
I find it surprising, too.

In my experience, designers are slower than programmers. It depends on the
product but usually it takes some time to tweak all Internet Explorer issues.

To hijack the thread a bit: designer's tools are horrible. Photoshop misleads
you, and designs done from PSD are easy to be poorly implemented. On the other
hand, CSS/XHTML slows your creativity down.

I find this is an enormous opportunity for profit.

~~~
jules
Do you have ideas on better tools for designers? I do for programmers, but if
designers are a bigger bottleneck it would be great if their tools could be
improved too :)

~~~
maurycy
Unfortunately, no. I'm a programmer and sometimes a manager, not a designer. I
don't know their pains too deeply. I merely keep seeing that the period
between their "aha!" moment and the final implementation is definitely too
long.

If I'd have to give any hints, I'd stick with what I wrote above, expanding it
a bit.

Photoshop is a handy tool but it tends to attract people who are not web
designers (there was a thread few days ago that you should hire a web designer
for web design; a logo designer for logo etc.); also, it requires some
experience with XHTML/CSS to get the fonts right, or realize that grid
matters.

On the other hand, current CSS frameworks are rather painful to work with. I
saw Blueprint hijacked million times, and the whole reloading concept is a big
headache for non tech savvy folks. (unfortunately, the same applies to
Compass)

------
bk
I've worked in 1-2 week sprints for ages, and it works really well. As pointed
out in the article, 1-2 weeks is a horizon/deadline that you can _feel_. That
pressure focuses.

As a humorous side note, the following quote really reminded me of the cadence
of <http://friedisms.tumblr.com/>

"We want to throw work overboard, not our sanity or our sleep. Late nights are
a sign of scope failure. Hero mode is a sign of scope failure. You can’t
compartmentalize burnout. Yes, we start new iterations every two weeks, but
burnout carries over. The scope hammer helps eliminate burnout."

