Who knows what the impact of a new feature will be. Will people understand it? Are we going to get swamped with support requests? Will it be a drag on performance? You can always count on uncertainties to scare you off. There are plenty of “What ifs” that can kill a good idea through fear, doubt, and uncertainty.
What you need to climb that wall is a willingness from someone to accept the risks and pay the price. The champion. He who wants this bad enough to be willing to deal with the initially confused customers, answer support emails related to the feature, and put in the work to make it fast and solid.
With a champion in place, most of the counter-arguments lose their appeal as they’re usually born from a perceived discrepancy between cost and reward. As in “sure you want this, but I’m going to be the one who has to deal with the mess”. When cost is assigned to the bulls, the perceived discrepancy of the bears dissipates.
The working title for this story: “How 37signals adopted OpenID”
Dhrumil
on 26 Jul 07Stated like a true champ. SVN is my Wheaties.
Justin
on 26 Jul 07David- We’re all glad you guys went whole-hog with OpenID, and rolled it into Rails proper. Now the entire Rails community gets it “free”. This will always be the beautiful benefit of using an open-source framework.
McFadly
on 26 Jul 07OpenID has doubled my satisfaction with Basecamp and Highrise. Thanks for championing the cause, hopefully you guys will encourage more companies to adopt.
Josh
on 26 Jul 07Great post. I guess that title could be extended to Champions pay the price, but it’s worth it. Like everyone else, I’m really pleased with the Open Bar and OpenID support, and the ‘working title’ and the end is proof that it works.
Walker Hamilton
on 26 Jul 07Yes, openID. Amazing stuff. Thank you Jan Rain, et. al.
Tim
on 26 Jul 07So who is the champion for OpenID in 37signal services?
Jacob Patton
on 26 Jul 07This part of your post really hits it home. When some parts of Highrise’s OpenID implementation were a little bit flawed (getting locked out of your account if you signed up with the wrong OpenID delegate URL, for example), David, you went to great lengths to not only get the problem fixed but to also respond to folks’ emails about the problem. That’s the sign of a champion right there.
Tim
on 26 Jul 07So I assume David championed OpenID for 37signal services.
sho'fr
on 26 Jul 07wise words indeed!
Rather than champion new features, over at sho’fr, finding a champion for individual vehicles (Corvette, Jeep, VW) was a wise decision. Same concept, slightly different use.
As always, passionate employees are far more productive than a guy punching a time clock.
JF
on 26 Jul 07Yup, David was the OpenID champion. I was initially against it on the ground that it was weird and techie, but have since come around.
Apostrophe
on 26 Jul 07So, when’s it gonna be in a production release of Rails? I’ve been writing a new app and waiting for this to stabilize.
DHH
on 26 Jul 07Apostrophe, the OpenID support for Rails is a plugin. It’s plenty stable. It’s not headed for core.
Planet Joe
on 26 Jul 07Open ID is actually what convinced me to sign up for HighRise…the thought of yet another password to remember and/or store in Firefox on ALL my computers knotted my intestines :-)
37 signals is a shining example of paying attention and getting it RIGHT. you all are amazing on all fronts; keep it up.
Anonymous Coward
on 26 Jul 07DDH, but your plugin still requires edge Rails, no?
mid-waltz
on 27 Jul 07Plus, it takes a lot of guts to refer yourself as the champion. :D
But then, who can blame you? ;)
Anonymous Coward
on 27 Jul 07I would have thought the solution would be to not respond to customer emails. I rarely get a response these days and I’m a paying customer.
JF
on 27 Jul 07AC, we respond to every email—usually within a few hours. Unfortunately since you’re anonymous we don’t know who you are.
LNN
on 01 Aug 07Are you for hire?
Seriously – do you have an area for “champions” of web programming to be hired?
This discussion is closed.