Come out to WindyCityRails in Chicago on September 6 to see me talk about “Essentials of Product Development.”

A lot of us here on SvN are product people. We know it’s not just the UI, engineering, or business idea that make a product. It’s how you bring them all together to make the world better than it was before.

I’ll share lessons from years of experience designing and building products at 37signals in the talk. Actually the things I’m most proud of aren’t even our official products. They’re the things I made on the side. It’s incredible what you can do with those few hours on nights and weekends when you have a strong hold of product development.

Many of us have deep questions that go beyond making a better product. We want to know how to make more progress on our product. Getting there requires you to bring the talents you have together at the right time, in the right order, with the right people, on the right things.

That’s the fundamental challenge, and I’ll be sharing techniques I’ve learned over the years to cut through it and make more progress on your product.

WindyCityRails is a great conference. I hope you’ll come out and see the other speakers too.

I’m speaking on September 6th at 2:15pm. You can register here before August 8th and save $150.

Offical abstract:

It takes more than talent to make a great product. You also have to focus on the right things, in the right order, with the right people at hand. Ryan will explain key points for successfully developing product so you can make the most progress on your big idea. The talk will cover common pitfalls, techniques for seeing the bigger picture, and advice on how to bring the different roles together.

See you there! Thanks to Ray for inviting me again this year.

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to get to spend about three hours with Clayton Christensen. Clay, currently a professor at Harvard Business School, is best known for his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. His latest book, How Will You Measure Your Life, has some wonderfully insightful business and life lessons.

His books, thinking, and approach to life, business, — and now, teaching — have influenced me greatly. I recommend reading everything he’s written and watching any videos of him you can find. Clay’s site is a good place to start.

What impressed me most about Clay yesterday was his clarity. He’s a very clear thinker and communicator. His genuine interest for helping other people discover clarity comes through with every patient word.

One thing he said

Spending time with Clay leads to lots of interesting insights, but for me, there was one that stood out among all the others.

You’ve probably heard it said that someone can’t be taught until they’re ready to learn. I’ve heard it said that way too. It makes sense, and my experience tells me it’s mostly true. Why though? Why can’t someone be taught until they’re ready to learn?

Clay explained it in a way that I’ve never heard before and I’ll never forget again. Paraphrased slightly, he said: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”

What an insight. He continued to talk about the power of questions. Questions are your mind’s receptors for answers. If you aren’t curious enough to want to know why, to want to ask questions, then you’re not making the room in your mind for answers. If you stop asking questions, your mind can’t grow.

I’ll never think about learning — and teaching — the same way again. Thank you Clay.

Related life-changing insight: Give it five minutes.

Formality is like a virus that infects the productive tissue of an organization. The symptoms are stiffness, stuffiness, and inflexibility – its origin never with those who do but with those that don’t.

When did you last hear a programmer or designer clamor to wear a suit to work? The order always come from the executives (followed shortly by a request for those TPS reports!)

Formality is more than a dress code, of course. It infects how people talk, write, and interact. It eats through all the edges and the individuality, leaving only the square behind. In other words, it’s all about posture, not productivity.

And once you place being proper above getting great work done, it’s unlikely that you’ll attract the best and most creative minds to work for you. (Though you’ll surely have no trouble filling the ranks with folks who can fit the existing molds.)

Formality is so ingrained in much of our working culture that even though people intuitively understand its harm, as in the colloquial “it’s just a formality, but we have to…”, it lives on.

Thankfully, there seems to be a cure: Companies started and run by doers. People close enough to the work to see the damage of formality and who’ll have none of it.

In technology, the best and brightest have long belonged to this class. Their images are iconic: Bezos in his jeans and sports coat, Jobs in his turtleneck and New Balance shoes, Zuckerberg in his hoodie.

Contrast this to the suits running RIM or Nokia or IBM. They’re either in literal decline and despair or they’ve found a second life of relevance in the tombs of The Enterprise.

We’re breaking down the stranglehold of formality everywhere. No more personal secretaries, memos on official letterhead, meetings that must happen in person. There’s never been less mental mask switching between work and play. We wear the same clothes, use the same technology. It’s a liberation of the mind and it’s the new world order.

Remember way back to, oh, six months ago when champagne was popping and markets were roaring? Back when companies with no or few profits could premiere on the world stage to grand applause by merely converting a dollar into fifty cents? Those were the good times of boom, boom, pow.

It’s amazing how quickly everyone has gone from rocking out to that tune to loathing those same beats. But that’s exactly what’s happened to the pop stocks of just a few minutes ago. Here’s a brief recap of just the last six months for three former stars:

• Zynga peaked at $15 in March, it’s now trading at $3. $8 billion has disappeared from its market cap.

• Groupon hit $25 in February, now it’s at $8. That’s another $10 billion in market cap lost.

• Facebook started at $38 in May, now down to $24. With almost two billion shares outstanding, that’s meant a drop of $27 billion — give or take — and a current market cap of $44B (not too far off the $33 billion I wouldn’t have paid two years ago.)

So between just these three, some $40 billion has been extracted from the market caps that pension funds and other last-sucker-in-line investors bought into. While, in the process, soured many on the idea of the public markets and enriched investment bankers hawking the toxic stocks. Hey, at least someone got out while the going was good.

Can someone kick the radio? We need a remix to get this party started again. Or we could, you know, change the channel and start valuing stocks based on fundamentals.

Nah, on second thought, fuck that. I hear Twitter is going for a $10B IPO. This Time It’s Different!

Note: Clarified the $40B extraction.

Last week I dropped into an online auction to see what was for sale.

The auction house uses the LiveAuctioneers software/service to conduct the online auctions.

This is what I saw:

At first, it’s easy to unfairly judge this UI by its cover. There are a lot of font sizes, colors, and shapes competing for your attention. It’s also clear that this design isn’t going to win any type direction awards.

But I ripped off my designer hat, gave it five minutes, and followed along as dozens of items were auctioned off live. I even jumped in on a few and ended up winning a couple.

And I have to tell you, this is really good interface design.

You may not be able to tell from looking at the still image I posted above, but if you’re in there, watching the items go up for bid, watching the bids flow by on the right in real-time, watching the auctioneer on live video, seeing the big yellow flags pop up when an item is about to close, and having a big fat red button that you can click to instantly place your bid, it’s all very clear. There’s a lot going on, but it’s all in the right place at the right time, and it worked flawlessly. I was very impressed.

Yes, it could look better, but it works great. And the works great part is the harder part of the UI to get right. A real-time live auction is a complicated task, and LiveAuctioneers made it work well with no learning curve. I look forward to using this service again.

Today we announced a brand new feature in the all new Basecamp called “Everything”.

Everything lets you see all the discussions, to-dos, files, text docs, and forwarded emails across all your projects on a single page.

It’s especially useful for those times when you know a file was uploaded, or a discussion was going on, but you don’t remember which project it was in.

Now you can just go to Everything, click “See every single file”, and now you can see all the files across all your projects in your entire Basecamp account on a single page. Huge time saver.

How the design came together

Here’s a link to the discussion where we discussed the design. You’ll see a variety of directions, feedback, revisions, more feedback, and then the final batch of ideas from which we picked the winner.

A quick decision

Here we made a quick decision regarding how this feature impacted the navigation.

Some debate

Here’s a thread where Ryan, David, and I are discussing where to include project names. There were some different opinions, we ended up trying the design without the project names, but in the end their absence was too much, so we added them back in.

The internal announcement

When the feature was done, David made the formal announcement to the whole company so everyone know what was coming.

Browse the whole project

Here’s a link to the whole project. Is yours to browse.

We hope you’re enjoying these backstage looks at how we use Basecamp to design and develop Basecamp. More soon!