Andrew Wicklander interviewed me for his Project Idealism podcast and our 45-minute chat is now online. Andrew’s background in software project management led to a lot of questions about how we work at 37signals. I was glad to dig into a number of topics including:
- How we emulate our “cowboy days” with teams of three
- How a growing company is like a cocktail party
- Picking and choosing from XP and Agile, and why basic values are more important than methodologies
- Why methodologies lose their meaning over time
- Why features become bloated when they are made for cases you don’t understand
- The overlap between UI design and product design
- How programmers and designers should negotiate on cost
- Who should manage projects: a designer or a programmer?
- How to not get lost in a project and the central challenge of doing just one thing at a time
- The costs of unfinished work
- The power of working in small steps and being in a “known state” between steps
- How doing less is still the hardest standard to keep
- and Why 37signals won’t be competing with Cisco anytime soon
Thanks a lot to Andrew for interviewing me and asking such thoughtful questions. The podcast is on his website and also available as episode #11 on iTunes.
Bryan Sebastian
on 10 May 11Thanks to Andrew and Ryan for putting this podcast together and sharing, very insightful. I always enjoy listening to Ryan’s views on design and development. Ryan has also inspired me to dive into TDD. Though it takes some getting used to, I am really starting to like it.
rango
on 11 May 11Great interview. Ryan was great… though the interviewer sounds like he’s about to jizz his pants over it all.
Darren
on 12 May 11What about a podcast of learning design principles from some industry, take the people search industry for example and engines like on http://www.findermind.com/free-people-search-engines/ , you can see the power of simplicity some of them use.
I loved the cocktail party analogy. I think that also fact is, the bigger the company is and the higher you want to climb the ladder, it’s more of a question of who you know instead of what you know.
- Darren
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