How 37signals Stays Lean

`0:07:44`

That's it. We've had a COO for a while. They were fine. They were good people. There wasn't enough work for them, frankly, to do the work, so they're just doing things that they didn't need to really do. And then when you do stuff you don't really need to do, you feel bad for them in a sense, because they're wasting their professional life doing things they don't really want to do, that doesn't need to get done. So, that doesn't feel good. We've had engineering managers, and we found out again that there was too many levels in between David, who's the CTO, and the people doing the work. He had to talk to someone else, who talked to someone else, and it's like a game of telephone. Things are lost in translation along the way. We tried those things. We had some thoughts that maybe this would be a better thing for us to do, and it turned out not to be a better thing to do. — How long does it take you to realize? — A year.

`0:08:30`

— Okay. — Basically. COO roles were longer. They were three years. We tried it twice. For the most part, we give everybody about a year to prove themselves at 37signals. And so, we hire somebody, and they have about a year until we decide if we're going to hire them again. That's how I think of the second year. It's a rehire. It's not like a performance review, where we look at numbers. It's like one simple question. If I can, I always try to boil everything down to a question that answers all the other questions. So, the question we ask after the first year with any new employee is, knowing what I know now, would I hire them again? And that answers pretty much every question. It answers every question about performance, about attitude, culture fit, all the stuff. If I know what I know now, would I hire them again?

`0:09:16`

And so, it turned out with the management stuff, we're like, it wasn't even about the people. It was more like, now that we know what we know now, would we create this position again? And the answer was no. So, we eliminated those positions and never rehired for them. So, that's how we kind of got back a little bit to a smaller size. — Does that work with products too, or features of products? — It can. It's harder. — You've rolled back people. — Yes. — You've rolled back entire products. — Yes. — Do you ever roll back features? — We have done that in some ways. Typically, so every five, six years, we kind of reinvent Basecamp, which is our main product, our biggest product. — Do you write it from scratch? — We have in the past. So, from Basecamp 1 to Basecamp 2 was a total rewrite. From 2 to 3 was a total rewrite, 3 to 4 was not, and 4 to 5, which we're working on now, is not. But it's a chance to revisit a lot of fundamental assumptions