Don’t innovate.
One of them is innovation, which they don’t speak much of. At least not of innovation in the sense of hitting on the next big thing. We take the pursuit of novelty as a requirement, often as the goal itself, but Jason and David disagree. They talk, instead, about quality.
It’s more important to build something good than something novel; it’s also much harder.
Quality takes time. Empirically, to build anything of value requires longer hours and more intense effort than it seems at first. That’s why Jason and David have learned to treat plans as mere guesses and to avoid tying themselves to big projects, where they know their projections will almost certainly be way off the mark.
To give you a sense of what they mean when they talk about quality, consider Basecamp, a product that was so good right out of the box that it broke even within weeks of launching. And yet for over 13 years now it has continued to evolve, to improve, and every iteration, more refined than the previous one, keeps pushing the quality bar even higher. So much higher, in fact, that in 2014 the company decided to drop all of its other products — two of them highly successful, mind you — and focus exclusively on Basecamp, betting that after more a decade of development they could still do better.
That doesn’t imply, however, that the way to make something great is to throw more money, more people and more time at it. More resources don’t solve more problems but often create new ones. So what do you do instead? How do you go about building a sustainable business on limited resources? The answers are both surprising and sane.
Think small. And then smaller.
First off, say Jason and David, to achieve big things, you need to think small. The moonshot goals you are often told to chase after can actually set you up for failure. You bite off too much too soon and choke. The exacting nature of quality means that you can either do one thing exceptionally well or many things badly — or at a merely passable level. Choose the former. Do just one thing at a time but do it exceptionally well. Indeed, think even smaller than that. “Cut your ambition in half”, say Jason and David.
You are better off with an ass-kicking half than a half-assed whole.
They don’t mean that ambition is bad, just that small can be a better starting point on the way to big things. But small also has underestimated virtues of its own. Basecamp, for example, is known for its minimal design. Even today, when the company can afford to spare no expense on the product, it maintains a think-small approach to feature development. The product does less than most competitors and yet Basecamp’s popularity keeps rising. As Jason and David like to say, only half joking, “if you want to beat your competitors, underdo them”.
We assume that more features make a better product, but Basecamp proves that the opposite is often true. The more you add to something, the more complex it becomes. Complexity spawns new problems you couldn’t have predicted beforehand: it creates clutter, increases confusion and reduces ease of use. Think of the Flip camera and its basic design, stripped down to a single button at the front. There isn’t much you can do with it, but the one thing that you can do — taking a picture — you can do in the simplest, most efficient way possible. And that’s precisely why many people loved the Flip camera.
Good designers kill the inessential.
Adding more features is a form of trying to please as many people as you can. But to really please one person, you’d have to piss another one off and so any attempt to meet different needs all at once ends up diluting the experience for everybody. In fact, according to Jason and David, if no one is upset about your product, it’s likely not because everyone loves it, but because it’s too boring to be worth the attention.
The way to build something your users actually care about is to act as a curator of their experience. Curators — from those who arrange gallery collections to chefs in great restaurants — think just as much about what they need to remove from the design as about what they need to add to it. Good design is like good taste: it’s largely defined by the omission of the unnecessary. Extraneous detail doesn’t enhance, it detracts from the desired effect.
Basecamp is both praised and criticized for its minimal design, but it’s more a matter of essentialism than minimalism. True, its features are few but not merely few; they are, instead, as few as necessary. For Jason and David, the biggest challenge for the designer is to discern the essential from the secondary and to not let the good ideas get in the way of the great ones. The real question is not what you can do or even what you would like to do but what you have to do.
It’s all too easy to get bogged down in details that are nice to have but not of essence. And while Jason and David don’t contest the power of the right detail, quality does demand sacrifices. To make room for their best work to emerge and to shine, writers cross out good paragraphs, directors cut out good scenes. You need to learn to operate with the same ruthlessness and discipline.
One way to determine what is necessary vs what isn’t is to start at what Jason and David call the epicenter, then build out from there while constantly circling back to it to avoid distractions. The epicenter is the core of what you are building, the thing without which your product wouldn’t work. One question you can ask yourself is “If I took this away, will what I’m selling still exist?” Jason and David offer the example of a hamburger stand. A hamburger stand has a whole lot of parts to it — from the cart to the various condiments — but only the hamburgers are essential. You can take everything away and still have a hamburger stand as long as you have hamburgers. They are the epicenter.
When in doubt about what direction to take, use the epicenter as an anchor and a compass. The first version of Basecamp shipped without a billing system. Instead of building one, the team used the time before the launch to fix key issues without which the product wouldn’t work. Taking payments wasn’t one of them. True, they needed a way to get paid but that wasn’t the epicenter. Basecamp functioned just as well without a billing system, so initially they set it aside, then they shipped and then they sat down to figure out how to get paid. Of course, it helped that billing occurred in monthly cycles and they had 30 days to crack it before the money came due. But you get the point.
Constraints enable creativity.
This example also underscores another central part of the decision-making process at 37Signals: embracing constraints. It sounds like a paradox, but Jason and David have learned that constrained decisions are often better decisions because the elimination of options enables speed, creativity and focus. Having limited time and resources before the launch forced them to be crystal clear about their priorities, selective about their features and creative about the non-essential but still important details.
I didn’t tell you that at the time of Basecamp’s initial development Jason and his 3 co-founders were in Chicago working full time on web design projects, while David, the only one with programming skills, was in Denmark finishing his graduate degree. Between school commitments, he barely managed to squeeze it 10 hours a week over 6 months to work on Basecamp. These limitations, quite annoying on the surface, forced — I mean, enabled — the simple, lightweight, easy-to-use design that people love about Basecamp.
Besides helping to clarify priorities, constraints compel creativity. They make you a better problem solver. We believe, mistakenly, that complex problems demand complex solutions and remain oblivious to cheaper or easier ones that may be lying in plain sight. But because they seem too simple and unimpressive, maybe a little beneath us, we become aware of them only when other options are not available.
You don’t have to face real constraints to reap their benefits. Nowadays Jason and David have almost unlimited resources on their hands but in spite of this — or perhaps because of it — they are careful to impose constraints on their decisions by asking questions that limit the set of available options. One such question is “Do you really need X?” For instance:
Do you really need $500,000 or is $50,000 enough for now?
Do you really need six months or can you make something in two?
Do you really need a big office or can you share office space or work from home for a while?
Do you really need to hire another person or can you do the job yourself?
For two years after BaseCamp launched Jason personally handled customer support, but there are other options that this line of questioning may open up. Can you eliminate the job altogether? Can you somehow automate it? Just asking yourself if you really need something forces you to consider a host of possibilities and creative solutions you may have overlooked otherwise.
Ask better questions.
Often, though, it’s not that we are not creative enough with our solutions; it’s that we are solving imaginary problems or the wrong ones. Here, too, questioning your actions and decisions can jolt you out of default mode and surface unconscious biases and unhelpful assumptions.
Some useful questions:
Why am I working on this?
What is it for?
What is the problem I am solving?
Who benefits from it being solved?
Here’s another one: What could I be doing instead?
Everything you do has an opportunity cost, whether you are aware of it or not. When you factor in that cost, a seemingly productive activity can turn out to be a waste of time. Meetings, for example.
Kill meetings.
According to Jason and David, meetings are some of the worst productivity killers in a company. A one hour meeting of 10 people is actually a 10-hour meeting, because the true cost to your company is one hour summed across all 10 people. And if you account for task-switching time, which can be significant, the opportunity cost gets even higher. Nothing, according to Jason and David, destroys productivity like an interruption. The smallest distraction — a tap on the shoulder, a quick office joke — can cause a disproportionately large disruption in your focus. And once you are interrupted, you don’t just slip back into your zone; you have to start all over again.
That’s why, Jason and David suggest you try your best to enforce large blocks of uninterrupted time for work. Some ways to do this are keeping meetings to a minimum, favouring passive asynchronous communication such as email over face time or instant messaging, or designating a certain day or certain times every day as no-talk times.
“Don’t throw good time after bad work.”
Besides the opportunity costs, some activities have sunk costs. In this case, you keep doing something even though it’s not working or no longer worth it because of all the time and effort you’ve already sunk into the activity. And also because you don’t want to give up and look like a quitter. What you end up doing, though, as Jason and David put it, is throwing good time after bad work out of ego. So, they say, don’t be a hero. Next time something isn’t working or it’s taking longer than you thought, ask yourself “why not quit?”
It’s tempting somewhat to call these “productivity hacks”. But that’s not how Jason and David see things. They don’t talk about productivity. Instead of doing more in less time, they care about wasting less ofthe time they already have. It’s that same thing they’ve been saying all along, really: that it’s not about the many but the meaningful few, not about the biggest possible but the smallest essential. Cast in this light, their advice doesn’t seem so revolutionary after all. It seems like getting back to basics. But in a world of secrets, tricks, tactics and hacks, perhaps the very things that actually make sense and matter have become the most revolutionary.
