What should we work on next and who’s going to do it? We recently created a new internal app called Iterations to answer that question. It’s for 1) managing our internal requests about which features/bugs to work on next and 2) helps us create teams/iterations to get them done (using our team-based way of working).

A completed feature request.

The problem
Before Iterations, we kept ideas for what to do next all over the place: in our heads, dumped into Backpack, on pet lists kept individually, in Campfire team rooms, etc.

Even when we did manage to collect ideas, the list(s) would quickly become unmanageable. Ideas ranged from tiny fixes to large-scale multi-term projects. It wasn’t clear who added each idea, and many were in the form of feature requests — not scoped to an iteration.

Collecting ideas
So we made Iterations in order to create an easy place to jot down a quick idea — even if it isn’t fully formed — and then let a team build on it from there. Iterations would also make it easier to expose small, slack-type projects that are ripe for doing when someone has a short window of downtime.

Viewing multiple requests at once. In this case, it’s completed items.

Continued…

When you think of great writing lessons, you usually don’t think of late-night TV hosts. But Conan O’Brien’s “People of Earth” letter was a pitch-perfect response to a crisis situation. It became big news and set the tone for everything that happened afterwards in the NBC/Conan/Leno debacle. And it offers lessons for anyone who needs to put a public face on a shitty situation.

A closer look
The note starts off light by addressing readers as the “People of Earth.” Then he declares himself lucky.

I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I’ve been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I’ve been absurdly lucky.

“Don’t feel sorry for me” is a great way to endear yourself to people in a time of trouble. Though this is obviously nowhere near a life-and-death situation, the approach here is vaguely reminiscent of Lou Gehrig telling a stadium of fans that, despite his illness, he considers himself “the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”

Conan then lays out an argument that is based on the legacy of the Tonight Show as opposed to himself.

I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show…My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction.

Now it’s about history, tradition, and Johnny instead of just some celeb moaning about being wronged.

He closes by admitting that he has no idea where things will go from here.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next.

Instead of playing hardball, he plays heartfelt. And the honesty worked. People rallied to his side and Team Coco was born.

The backstory
Now the behind-the-scenes story of how this letter came to be is coming to light. According to “The Unsocial Network,” which looks at the Conan/Leno showdown, it started when Conan’s team first learned what NBC was up to. They reached out to “the best, toughest” litigator they knew, Patty Glaser, and she got together with Conan and his team.

Continued…

Back in January, we began working in teams.

A team is made of three people: One designer and two programmers. A system administrator will also assist the team when necessary…

Each team will stay together for two months (a “term”). When two months are up, the teams split up and form again with different people. This way everyone gets to work with everyone else…

During the two month term, there will be four iterations. An iteration lasts for two weeks. An iteration can tackle one feature, a variety of smaller features, or part of a bigger feature that will require multiple iterations to complete.

It went well and we’ve stuck to this model while also evolving it along the way. This two-month recap offered up the results of the first term and some lessons learned. For example:

Lesson: Get out the scope hammer early and often
For two week iterations, true scope should be nailed down no later than half-way through. We found ourselves up against the wall a few times because we didn’t cut scope early enough. So we decided that on Monday of the second week we’ll review the work done during the previous week and the work remaining to complete the iteration. Since humans are notoriously bad estimators, we’ll be extra conservative with scope. We’ll bring out the hammer and beat down the scope. And then we’ll do it again on Wednesday, two days before the end of the iteration.

It’s now nine months later, so let’s check in again and see what else we’ve learned since then.

Lesson: Deploy is not the finish line
After an iteration is deployed, teams now go into a cooldown phase — something we didn’t have originally. This means team members go into support mode and deal with issues related to the deploy and any general concerns coming back from the Support team. That means fixing bugs, revising copy in the help section and/or email responses, and responding to queries at our Answers forum.

There’s no set length for this phase since you can’t plot exactly how it will play out. So we wait and see. We only assume the latest deploy is good to go once Support is in the clear for 6-12 hours. Then, and only then, is it time to move on to a new iteration.

Worth noting: It’s usually not a full court press on Support in this phase so this period also serves as a general cooldown and cleanup period. If one of the programmers is chasing an on-call issue, the other can refactor some code from the iteration that could be a general plugin. Meanwhile, the designer can help someone else explore an idea.

Lesson: Get away from calendar mode
We originally thought it best to have teams work strictly in two week iterations. But we’ve realized mapping iterations to calendar days causes problems. If you go from this Monday (the 1st) to that Monday (the 14th), you ignore vacations, holidays, summer schedules with 4-day workweeks, etc.

So we now measure iterations in number of working days. We’ll estimate how long it will take a team to finish a unit of work. If it’s seven working days and it’s during the summer, that means we’ll work on it Monday-Thursday (4 days) and Monday-Wednesday (3 days). We’ll then deploy on Wednesday night.

If something pops up that distracts the team for a day — say a major emergency or the need to help some other team out — everything just shifts forward a day. The deploy that was scheduled on Wednesday moves to Thursday. This means that iterations can end on any day of the week and start on any day of the week.

We noticed a similar issue with the length of team terms. It can be hard for a team to gel if it’s two-month term is during heavy vacation times (say, August or December). We’re now trying three-month terms to give teams more time to work together.

Lesson: Track your iterations
It’s important to stop and take a look back at how the time was spent. A term time card for a two-month term might look something like this:

Iteration 1: Estimated 7 days, actual days 7, quiet period 2 days
Iteration 2: Estimated 5 days, actual days 6, quiet period 1 days
Iteration 3: Estimated 10 days, actual days 9, quiet period 3 days
Iteration 4: Estimated 4 days, actual days 5, quiet period 3 days

When we look back at this time card, we see that Iteration 4 had the most problems. It was off a day and it had the longest quiet period relative to its duration. At that point, we know to dive in for closer review and see what caused issues with that iteration.

Lesson: Have a project “scribe”
At our last meetup, one of our Sys Admins expressed feeling out of the loop with the teams. Of course, we’re now at 20 people so no matter how we try, it’s going to be harder to keep the same intimate vibe we had when we were half that size. But we are taking steps to keep that tight-team feel whenever we can.

For one thing, we plan on meeting in person more often. The new office has helped spur more face-to-face meetings and trips to HQ for out-of-towners.

Also, we’ve added a role for project “scribe.” There’s one on each team and that person’s responsibility is to keep everyone else informed of what’s happening. The scribe posts a summary at the beginning and end of each iteration explaining what’s being tackled, what we got done, what issues arose, what delays occurred, etc. When everyone knows what’s going on with everyone else, the company feels more connected.

Continued…

We’re teaming up with Griffin Technology to give 10 people their iPad Stylus along with our Draft app. Visit Griffin for full directions on how to enter.

Griffin’s Stylus is among the most popular iPad Stylus on the market. Bob Tedeschi from The New York Times recently wrote about it in his Gadgetwise column:

Use a good stylus like one from Griffin Technologies. It’s $20, but unlike other products on the market, it feels like a pen and its metal clip holds fast to your iPad notebook. And it won’t snap easily, like the many plastic stylus devices on the market.

Jason Zimdars is one 37signals designer who uses the Stylus. His thoughts on it:

It gives you a little more precision than using your finger because the tip is smaller than your finger, especially because you can see better. Your finger covers more of the image when you’re drawing. But for me I think more than anything it just feels more natural to use a pencil-like tool rather than a finger when you’re drawing. So it’s more natural for me to grab an iPad and the stylus just like I would a pen and my sketchbook.

Draft is a straightforward sketch app for iPad. You can get it in the App Store for $9.99.

More details on the contest and how to enter.

The overwhelming way: Head down forever and hope there will be a big payoff at the end.

The problem: The finish line always seems like it’s miles away. You spend 99% of your time anxious and only experience joy at the end (if ever). Sometimes you’re so intimidated by the idea, you give up.

A more soothing approach: Break what you’re doing into smaller, incremental units. Then you get to celebrate each step of the way instead of waiting until the end.

Artist Chuck Close is someone who chooses this approach. He’s famous for his portraits of faces despite suffering from prosopagnosia — aka face blindness. He overcomes this by working in incremental units. He uses a pixilated approach to painting that turns faces into a grid of individual squares. In this interview, he explains why.

The fact that there are incremental units is driven by my learning disability. I was overwhelmed by the whole. How am I going to make a head? How am I going to make a nose? It’s too overwhelming. It makes me too anxious. But if I break it down into a lot of little decisions…

This was a coping mechanism I used all throughout school and everything that I did. Take something overwhelming and anxiety provoking and make it into little, not-so-scary decisions and have it be a positive experience. Because every time I completed a square, I didn’t have to wait until the end to get pleasure. I could solve one little problem at a time and the pleasure came with each one of those.

Solve one little problem at a time and you get a steady IV drip of pleasure. And that’s great motivation to keep going.

Continued…

This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Terry Jackson of Admoda responds in the comments section to reader questions.

One sign that Admoda, an ad network for mobile phones, is doing things a little bit differently: this press release announcing the company’s rejection of ”$25M of 3rd Round investment.”

Along with the angel investment of $250,000 that Admoda (and sister service Adultmoda) declined initially, the $3M in declined first round funding, and the $10M in declined second round funding, this latest round brings the total investment declined by Admoda to $38.25M…

Terry Jackson, CEO and founder of Admoda, had this to say, “Well, we did consider the traditional N step business plan of startups in the tech sector. But, in the end, we opted for a less-conventional, two-step plan; First, build a profitable business and grow it by re-investing the profits. Second … Sorry, did I say ‘two steps’? There’s just the one, actually.”

A fun little April Fool’s joke — but one inspired by frustration. “Many companies seem far more excited about sending out a press release regarding a round of funding then they would if they clinched a great sale or shipped a superb product,” explains Jackson when asked why the company posted the fake release. “It’s as if raising finance is the end goal for some businesses — like a prize or some kind of status symbol. It’s always press releases about VC funding too — I’ve noticed bank loans are not that cool. Investment is great if it is for the right reasons. But it should not be considered as a goal for a business in itself.”

How Admoda started
Back in 2002, Jackson founded MobVision, a group of businesses selling mobile content and mobile affiliation services. By 2005, he realized clients were struggling for ways to get traffic and thus the idea for Admoda sprouted. He felt that building an ad network for companies to buy and sell mobile traffic seemed a natural service to launch.

In 2006, Jackson (pictured at left) and co-founder David Salgado launched Admoda. It’s a global network run out of London, UK. There’s also a partner service called Adultmoda for mobile ad campaigns aimed at adults.

The founders started out with a set of goals: Bootstrap from the start, avoid the need for investment, provide a great service, build a great place to work, make a lot of money, and have fun. Jackson encourages other startups to also figure out their goals in the beginning. “Every founder should ask themselves: ‘What were the reasons I had for starting my business in the first place? What was I looking for from the business? What excited me? What drove me?’” he explains. “If those things are being achieved, or on their way to being achieved, then the business is successful.”

The founders funded themselves through their own cash, though they didn’t need much capital outlay at first. They launched Admoda as the most basic ad network companies could use to buy and sell traffic. Soon they made money and invested it back in.

The company has been profitable since shortly after launch and the number of ad requests per month has doubled in the last year, according to Jackson. The combined networks currently see over 7.5 billion ad requests per month. While Admoda is slightly larger, Adultmoda is the largest adult mobile ad network in the world.

Productivity as a measure of success
Profit is key, but Jackson feels productivity is also a good way to measure the success of a business. “We far outstrip the productivity of any of our competitors when you compare the volume of business our small team delivers compared to our larger VC funded competitors with their massive pools of staff and global offices,” he says.

Jackson feels using a company head count as something to brag about is ridiculous. (Admoda has a core team of only nine people.) “If you have the productivity to match the head count, great. But raising $40m and recruiting 85 employees does not constitute a good business — or a successful one.”

Exit strategy, or lack thereof
Admoda isn’t interested in the acquisition game either. He says, “Virtually all mobile phone ad networks at the moment are raising investment, spending money, making a loss, and desperately trying to be acquired by someone with very deep pockets,” he says. “This is not a scenario that comes along and attacks from behind. Companies and the founders create their own destiny. Once you set off on the route of needing to make money you end up on a very different road than companies who don’t necessarily need to make money quickly because they have investment.”

Being funded by profit results in different choices. “We have to carefully decide where to channel our available resources,” he explains. “It also means we focus on making money rather than spending it, which requires a very different approach to business compared to many of our competitors. You can sense the desperation from some VC funded mobile advertising companies who are not yet acquired.”

We focus on making money rather than spending it, which requires a very different approach to business compared to many of our competitors.

Continued…

For years, Nordstrom’s Employee Handbook was a single 5×8” gray card containing these 75 words:

Welcome to Nordstrom

We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.

Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

During this time, Nordstrom had the highest sales per square foot performance in the retail industry – by almost double. [thx Ian]

How do you hire a programmer if you’re not one yourself? Some things to look for…

1. How opinionated are they?

Ask them about a juicy programming topic (e.g. Ruby or Python?). The tone and reasoning of the answer will reveal a lot. In our recent podcast on programming, Jeff said, “When people have strong opinions about things — when they can talk at length about something — it’s a good indication that they’re passionate about it.”

2. How much do they contribute to open source projects?

Look at their contributions. Though you may not be a coder, you’ll be able to tell if there’s some code there. And the fact that somebody is contributing something is a good start. “The fact that somebody is contributing at all means they’re using the tool,” said Jamis. “It means they’re scratching an itch, like they ran into something that they thought should be improved, or ran into a bug and they fixed it themselves. That level of participation is a good discriminator.”

3. How much do they enjoy programming?

They don’t have to spend every second of their free time hacking, but you do want to see some level of passion. Jamis said, “It’s not so much that coding in your free time is the important thing so much as it is that you’re showing you’re passionate about it and that you have opinions.”

4. Do they actually ship?

Find out how they manage their work. Software often slips — find out how they avoid this. Find out when they shipped something on time and ask why that project was successful. Or find out lessons learned from a delayed project. “The ability to ship software is critical,” according to Jeremy. “How they manage the very task oriented part of actually needing to get something done and finished by a certain time.”

5. What have they mastered?

Randy Nelson of Pixar argues that mastery in anything is a really good predictor of mastering something else. So look for someone who’s mastered something. Is the candidate a great chef? Or mountain biker? Or something else? That’s a sign they can be a master on your project too. “That sense of I’m going to get to the top of that mountain separates them from all of the other candidates almost instantly,” says Nelson. “There’s very little chance that someone’s going to achieve mastery on the job if they didn’t get there before coming to your workplace.”

6. How well do they communicate?

The less you understand about programming, the more you’re going to rely on this person to translate what’s going on to you. That’s why hiring great writers, regardless of the position, is a good idea. For example, here’s Jeff explaining a Basecamp API update to the rest of the team inside the project site:

I just pushed an update to Basecamp’s People and Companies APIs.

We now allow client and firm employees to see people and companies that they have access to through projects. Prior to this update, firm and client employees could only see people using a specific project ID. There was no way for them to see all people (i.e., colleagues) that they are involved with across projects.

For example, if the API user making the request is on one project with Bob and another with Jill, /people.xml will return Bob and Jill. If the requesting user is an administrator, all people in the account will be returned.

The same is true for companies.

When programmers can both code and speak a language that non-programmers understand, things are a lot less likely to go wrong.

Continued…

Fast Company: “For a Company That Sells Productivity, A Space That Fosters It: Inside 37signals’ new office in Chicago”

Google likes to characterize Android as “open” and iOS/iPhone as “closed.” That puts Apple in a tough spot. Arguing for a closed system when the competition is offering an open one makes you seem like the bad guy.

But change the words being used and it becomes an entirely different debate. Closed vs. open is one thing, fragmented vs. integrated is something else. Look at how Steve Jobs reframes the issue during this conference call with analysts:

We think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, “What’s best for the customer – fragmented versus integrated?” We think Android is very, very fragmented, and becoming more fragmented by the day. And as you know, Apple strives for the integrated model so that the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator. We see tremendous value at having Apple, rather than our users, be the systems integrator. We think this a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s: when selling the users who want their devices to just work, we believe that integrated will trump fragmented every time.

...So we are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as “closed.” And we are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as “open.”

Reframing in politics
Reminds me of how politicians use words to reframe issues. Consultant Frank Luntz advises Republicans to use phrases like “death tax” instead of “estate tax.”

Look, for years, political people and lawyers — who, by the way, are the worst communicators — used the phrase “estate tax.” And for years they couldn’t eliminate it. The public wouldn’t support it because the word “estate” sounds wealthy. Someone like me comes around and realizes that it’s not an estate tax, it’s a death tax, because you’re taxed at death. And suddenly something that isn’t viable achieves the support of 75 percent of the American people. It’s the same tax, but nobody really knows what an estate is. But they certainly know what it means to be taxed when you die.

Meanwhile, George Lakoff, a Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, pushes liberals to reclaim terms like life, patriot, and family values.

Consider progressives across the country consistently saying something like this: “I am for life. That’s why I support the right of all women to receive prenatal care and the right of all children to receive immunizations and to be treated when they are sick. That’s why I believe we must safeguard the planet that sustains all life.”

Or perhaps this: “I am a patriot. That’s why I am compelled to oppose the government’s spying on American citizens without court order and in defiance of Congress.”

Say it again
At least Luntz and Lakoff agree on one thing: It’s all about repetition. Lakoff writes, “Repetition of such articulations is the key to redefining these words and reclaiming them.” Luntz says, “There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.”

So don’t be surprised if we hear more “fragmented vs. integrated” talk coming out of Cupertino.