Back in early January I posted about our new way of working in 2010. Instead of working individually in isolation as we had in the past, we’re breaking into small teams of three (two programmers, one designer). We’re keeping the teams intact for two months at a time. During those two months, the teams will work on four separate iterations, two weeks each. The goal is to drastically cut down scope, set short fixed deadlines, and focus on improving our products.
How’d it go?
Now that January and February are behind us, and March is upon us, we can reflect on the first two month term. So how’d it go?
It went incredibly well. It was the most productive two month period we’ve had in a long time. It wasn’t all perfect, and some adjustments were required, but all in all we definitely feel like we made the right call switching to this new way of working.
This is the last video trailer for REWORK. We wanted to thank the following people for making these trailers possible:
Coudal Partners for filming, editing, and production. Special thanks to Steve Delahoyde.
Mark Greenberg for the custom music at the end of each clip.
Williams Labadie for lending us their conference room for the day for the Conference Call. Special thanks to Molly Connolly, Jeff Pazen, and Jason Dittmer.
That simplicity has made Twitter a huge hit. But “simple” usually means “limited,” and Twitter is no exception. Your messages can’t be longer than 140 characters. There’s no text formatting. You can’t paste in photos or videos. There’s no filtering of messages. No way to rank or rate people or their utterances. No way to send messages out to canned groups of people, like Family or Co-workers.
There’s so much Google Buzz can do…
Google Buzz overcomes all of that. It’s a lot like Twitter (with huge helpings of FriendFeed.com thrown in), but there’s no length limit on your messages. You can search for messages, give certain ones a “thumbs up” (you click a button labeled Like as you do in Facebook). You can forward messages by e-mail. Comments and replies to a certain post remain attached to it, clumped together as a conversation. You can link to your Flickr, Picasa or YouTube accounts, making it easy to drop a photo or a video link into a Buzz posting.
You can also post messages to your Buzz account by e-mail, which is great when you’re on the move.
So a traditional feature checklist comparison would lead you to say Buzz is the clear winner. But then there’s the problem that comes with doing all that stuff: confusion.
In eliminating the Twitterish bare-bones simplicity, Google stepped right splat into the opposite problem: dizzying complexity. At the moment, it’s not so much Google Buzz as Google “Huh?”s.
Sometimes all that stuff your product does NOT do is exactly why people want it.
This is a guest post by Mike Rohde. We hired Mike to illustrate original art for REWORK. Each one of the 90 essays in REWORK is accompanied by an illustration that captures the key message of the essay. We asked Mike to share the illustration process with you here on Signal vs. Noise. This post is part 1 of a 2-part series. Part 2 will be posted within the next few weeks.
In September 2009, I began work with Jason Fried to create a series of 90 sketchnote illustrations and 10 chapter illustrations for the new 37signals business book, REWORK. In December 2009, I completed the illustration project, delivering final illustrations to the publisher for book production.
Photo of sketches in my Moleskine notebook, featuring “Everyone on the Front Lines” and “Take a Deep Breath” — two illustration concepts for REWORK that are ready for inking. –Photo by Mike Rohde
Project Background
I met Jason after he saw the sketchnotes I’d captured at his first SEED conference in 2007. Those sketchnotes were featured on Signal vs. Noise and led to an invitation to sketchnote the SEED 3 conference in June 2008. The SEED 3 sketchnotes led, in turn, to sketchnoting Jason’s talk on business at Milwaukee’s Discovery World in September 2008.
In “Life, below 600px,” Paddy Donnelly talks about “giving the fold the finger” (i.e. making visitors scroll isn’t really THAT bad) and uses the 37signals home page to support the cause. “What I’m proposing is for you to think twice about these ‘rules’ which are preached so often around the web and aim to create something original.”
It’s kind of pretty here. Shot from 
A look at the conference table during company wide meeting. Yes, even we meet once in a while.
Jamis brought peanut butter flavored marshmallows that he made at home.
Sam’s got one of the cool 
We’re recording it all for the one team member who couldn’t make it.
Lots of tea gets drunk.
