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When you start to think about your company as a product, all sorts of new possibilities for improvement emerge. When you realize the way you work is malleable, you can start molding something new, something better.
Much corporate anxiety comes from the realization that the company has been doing the wrong thing, but it’s too late to change direction because of the “Plan.” “We’ve got to see it through!” Seeing a bad idea through just because at one point it sounded like a good idea is a tragic waste of energy and talent.
“But how do you know if someone’s working if you can’t see them?” Same answer as this question: “How do you know if someone’s working if you can see them?” You don’t. The only way to know if work is getting done is by looking at the actual work. That’s the boss’s job. If they can’t do that job, they should find another one.
For example, when we’re choosing a new designer, we hire each of the finalists for a week, pay them $1,500 for that time, and ask them to do a sample project for us. Then we have something to evaluate that’s current, real, and completely theirs.
We assess new hires on a scale that goes from junior programmer, to programmer, to senior programmer, to lead programmer, to principal programmer (or designer or customer support or ops or whatever role we’re hiring for). We use the same scale to assess when someone is in line for a promotion. Every employee, new or old, fits into a level on the scale, and there is a salary pegged to each level per role. Once every year we review market rates and issue raises automatically. Our target is to pay everyone at the company at the top 10 percent of the market regardless of their role.
We’ve also recently put a new profit growth-sharing scheme in place. If total profits grow year over year, we’ll distribute 25 percent of that growth to employees in that year. This isn’t tied to role, it’s not about individual performance, and since we don’t have salespeople, it’s not commission. Everyone shares or no one gets it.
Fully paid vacations every year for everyone who’s been with the company for more than a year.
Three-day weekends all summer. May through September we only work 32-hour weeks.
30-day-paid sabbaticals every three years.
$1,000 per year continuing-education stipend.
$2,000 per year charity match. Donate to a charity of your choice up to $2,000, and we’ll match it up to $2,000.
One monthly massage at an actual spa, not the office.
Not a single benefit aimed at trapping people at the office. Not a single benefit that would make someone prefer to be at work rather than at home.
Rather than thinking of it as an office, we think of it as a library. In fact, we call our guiding principle: Library Rules.
That’s why whenever someone leaves Basecamp, an immediate goodbye announcement is sent out companywide. This announcement is written by either the person leaving or their manager.
What’s variable is the scope of the problem—the work itself. But only on the downside. You can’t fix a deadline and then add more work to it. That’s not fair. Our projects can only get smaller over time, not larger. As we progress, we separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves and toss out the nonessentials.
A deadline with a flexible scope invites pushback, compromises, and tradeoffs—all ingredients in healthy, calm projects. It’s when you try to fix both scope and time that you have a recipe for dread, overwork, and exhaustion.
instead of shipping big software updates on Fridays, we now wait until Monday the following week to do it. Yes, this introduced other risks—if we somehow make a big mistake, we’re introducing it on the busiest day of the week. But knowing that also helps us be better prepared for the release. When there’s more at stake, you tend to measure twice, cut once.
You don’t have to let something slide for long before it becomes the new normal. Culture is what culture does. Culture isn’t what you intend it to be. It’s not what you hope or aspire for it to be. It’s what you do. So do better.
Throwing away a bunch of work, simply because of the way you worked on it, is a morale gut punch. But that’s what happens when your work is filled with dependencies. Today we ship things when they’re ready rather than when they’re coordinated. If it’s ready for the web, ship it! iOS will catch up when they’re ready. Or if iOS is first, Android will get there when they’re ready. The same is true for the web. Customers get the value when it’s ready wherever, not when it’s ready everywhere. So don’t tie more knots, cut more ties. The fewer bonds, the better.
What’s especially important in disagree-and-commit situations is that the final decision should be explained clearly to everyone involved. It’s not just decide and go, it’s decide, explain, and go.
Once the initial exploration is over, every week should lead us closer to being done, not further from it. Commit to an idea. See it through. Make it happen. You can always go back later, but only if you actually finish.
We don’t throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across the finish line by teams of three.
What is it with three? Three is a wedge, and that’s why it works. Three has a sharp point. It’s an odd number, so there are no ties. It’s powerful enough to make a dent, but also weak enough to not break what isn’t broken.
Be it in hours, degrees of difficulty, or even specific benefits that emphasize seasonality, find ways to melt the monotony of work. People grow dull and stiff if they stay in the same swing for too long.
The problem with per-seat pricing is that it makes your biggest customers your best customers. With money comes influence, if not outright power. And from that flows decisions about what and who to spend time on.
Promises pile up like debt, and they accrue interest, too. The longer you wait to fulfill them, the more they cost to pay off and the worse the regret. When it’s time to do the work, you realize just how expensive that yes really was.
It’s taken us a long time and a number of missteps to learn this core truth about selling: Sell new customers on the new thing and let old customers keep whatever they already have. This is the way to keep the peace and maintain the calm.
Jean-Louis Gassée, who used to run Apple France, describes this situation as the choice between two tokens. When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says “It’s no big deal” or the token that says “It’s the end of the world.” Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other.
