What is Reddit's opinion of
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I keep thinking about going solo - except I don't yet have enough funds and I have a family to support. On the other hand my job sucks and as I look out into the market all jobs equally suck. If I had to continue my career like this for 3 more years I would probably get depressed.
I have to wonder though, is it really a good idea to just try a few small random projects and see what sticks? That might make sense if you are just selling things made by other people, but when you are the person making the product, I don't think it's a good idea.
Good software products take a long time to create. Trying many things out means you will not spend enough time on it and thus won't have a good product to sell. So when it doesn't sell, you can't tell why: is it because no one wants such a thing, or is it because the product is incomplete? It might very well be that the product could sell if you had just spent the time to make it really good.
I don't think the product has to be novel even. It might be just fine to pick a market that already exists - as long as you can be confident you can produce something significantly better than everything out there. I don't mean to clone something and try to compete with the entire list of features; this is foolish. Instead focus on solving the core problem in that market, and do it 10x better than the competition. Leave the other fluff for later. (See "Build Less" by 37 signals).
Lots of services would create many more than that. Every Slack organisation gets their own sub, and this is a common pattern that's often used when a service is conceptually made for organisations (or groups of people) first and users second, or if it lets users create web pages.
Some other examples – https://surge.sh, https://basecamp.com/, https://pages.github.com/
Pretty sure most things like this just use wildcards (cert for *.github.com, etc.) with other cert providers. /u/netuoso mentioned AWS Cert Manager below, which is free as long as you're using the certs for stuff hosted on AWS.
"So what do you do with all these requests that pour in? Where do you store them? How do you manage them? You don’t. Just read them and then throw them away." - 37signals
And if you think I'm making that up, page 56. https://basecamp.com/books/Getting%20Real.pdf
Actually, I think the themeforest license does allow designers to sell the design:
>Note to freelancers and creative agencies:
>You may charge your client for your services to create an end product, even under the Regular License. But you can’t use one of our standard licenses on multiple clients or jobs.
What you're talking about is if someone were to create a webapp using a theme and then charge end users, as in the people using the website, for the service. Something like Basecamp or Thymer.
> Mix this with their need to keep “deleted” data for 30 days, and I think it’s safe to say they don’t care much about privacy but instead data mining with social media platform dreams.
Keeping data around for 30 days after it is "deleted" seems to be a fairly common practice. For example, Basecamp, which is a very pro-privacy company, does the same: https://basecamp.com/about/policies/privacy#when-you-delete-data-in-your-product-accounts
Moreover, most SaaS products with a multi-tenant architecture likely take a full database snapshots that they store as backups for some period of time (e.g. 30 days). These backups are likely going to be compressed and stored away from active servers in "cold" storage that cannot be accessed directly. When you delete your account/posts/whatever, you can't reasonably expect that the backups will unpacked, edited, and repacked to eliminate your data. That's cost prohibitive and largely takes away from the point of taking backups.
The only way around this is if you had a single-tenant architecture, where your database/backups are all separate per client. But that's never going to be the case in a B2C application, because you as a regular user usually expect a free or low cost service, not to pay $10,000+ per month (which is the price point at which you start to see single-tenant architectures).
Source: I'm the CTO of a SaaS company with a multi-tenant architecture and this is a problem we have to deal with.
Take a look at ClickUp and/or Basecamp. Both of these tools are great for people that are new to project management software and have a super easy learning curve.
It took my team no time to adapt to ClickUp and we were actively using the tool within minutes. The best part about this software is that they provide a ton of custom features that allow you to tailor the tool to your needs. Their custom notifications would be perfect for you and your team. This feature allows you to set up your notifications to only trigger reminders for the items that are relevant to you. They also give you three different ways to view your work making it extremely simple to figure out what's been completed, what's in progress, and what's outstanding. This would be my first choice as its increased our productivity and has really helped with organization and collaboration.
I used Basecamp at a previous company and found this tool to be intuitive as well. This application makes it extremely easy to add users, documents, and track progress. The tool has a cartoon-like interface that was just a tad bit cheesy for me and some of my team members. However, if you and your team can appreciate a social media inspired dashboard this could be for you. Unfortunately, they do not offer any customization options which can be a major drawback.
Sometimes I wish there was more dialogue beween game devs and web devs because this same topic has been thrashed out at length and it's no longer that controversial.
I seem to recall it was a major theme of Jason Fried's (of 37 Signals fame - well, fame if you follow that kind of thing) "Getting Real"
https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real
Your customers are terrible for prioritizing features because a new feature has zero cost to them. For you it has a huge cost which changes the balance significantly.
Also see the apocryphal Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
You might like the Shape Up method from Basecamp.
Reading the book on it now and keen to try it with new job starting soon :) https://basecamp.com/shapeup
A short "main points" article about that book from someone else here: https://simpleshapes.io/articles/5-takeaways-from-shape-up/
It looks like you have a two part problem: Tools & Culture
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Tools:
- Project Management — Basecamp — It does everything you listed as needs in your post. It's only $100 per month.
- Everything else (Email, calendar, Drive) — GSuite — You already use this, great!
- Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) manual — A document with crystal clear step-by-step instructions for every part of what you do. The project steps, the email subject lines, the customer interactions; everything.
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Culture:
- Everyone has access to the SOP manual
- If someone doesn't follow the SOP, they are called out on it
- If someone repeatedly doesn't follow the SOPs, they are fired
- This culture must be actively s*upported* and actioned by company leadership, otherwise people won't take it seriously and it will fail.
​
Source: I run a 7 person project-based company very much like yours, but in a different industry. This is how we've run things for 2.5 years and IMO it is vastly better than any other system I've used or been required to use. I'd consider our day to day work very calm, clear, and organized; despite the fact that we regularly work on dozens of projects simultaneously.
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Good luck. Let me know if you have any questions.
I was a jazz musician who ended up co-founding a startup and running a team of nearly 40 people (and went through an acquisition). I totally get what you're going through!
The best books I can think of for your situation are:
- High Output Management by Andrew Grove
- Getting Real by 37 Signals (free copy here)
- The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday
If you'd like to chat sometime, send me a message. I've been through a ton of ups and downs, from patent trolls, to crashing on Black Friday, to key employees quitting etc.
If you don’t like Slack for whatever reason, don’t forget, there are alternatives!
I’m sure there are others, but these are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
I’ve used them all, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but they’re all pretty good. Try them out!
I also tried https://basecamp.com/, which is famously the original Rails application, and the only server side anything it gave me was Nginx. It would be interesting to see stats on what percentage of websites we actually know the server side language of.
There is a couple ways I organize everything. Personal preference is a must!
- Organized board of all my resources using Papaly. For example, my Design Board
- A carefully managed collection of notebooks (pen and paper) and a whiteboard at arm's length
- Project management systems such as Basecamp
This company is now basecamp and has managers: https://basecamp.com/handbook/06-orgchart
They also state very clearly themselves that 37signals was "disorganized". https://basecamp.com/handbook/05-product-histories
So... yeah.
Based on this, the tenure is pretty high, especially for a tech company
Given how vocal some team members are being, I will be very surprised if we don't see at least a handful of employees leaving after this, unless Basecamp backpedals. (And knowing DHH, I seriously doubt that will happen. His entire career and coding philosophy has been based on being opinionated and not backing down.)
There is a free ebook called [Getting Real](https://basecamp.com/books/Getting%20Real.pdf) put together by the people that make Ruby on Rails (among other things). They argue that writing skills are important and they value them during the hiring process.
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Software development is a design process which is more customer centric than most of us would probably like. Good writing is an indicator of good communication skills. Good communication leads to better software.
We use a combo of Basecamp and Slack for a team of about 50. Helps with organizing and assignment between resources as well as providing a fast way for everyone to discuss a project and still keep a running record.
For a personal to do style setup I like Trello. You can setup different boards for different projects and then make different lists for progress and rearrange the tasks as things become a priority.
All of these are accessible from your desktop or thru apps on your phone.
If you want to be super basic, just use google sheets to make a project plan and color code what is completed, what is in process, and what is still waiting. Easy over view for your management to see.
Hope this helps!
We really are looking for someone who knows Android well, and is a self-starter and driven. This isn't an entry level position though. Check out the full page for more info on what we're looking for.
Also: "Lead" does not imply age in any way - that would be illegal!
I know this is all about physical school supplies, but I thought it may be worth posting to let teachers know that Basecamp - a web-based project management tool - is completely free for teachers.
This is a $100/month value, and they can invite as many teachers and students to join and use the account as they like totally free of charge. This is a worldwide offer as well, there's no regional restriction, so schools in all countries can use it.
I know a lot of teachers that use this and find it really helpful, so hopefully it will be of some use to other teachers here. :)
Keep up the good work teachers!
This is precisely why we use the Shape Up method at our dev shop. If the job to be done is going from Point A to Point B, you might make a skateboard, then a bicycle, then a car, then a limo- obtaining capability and complexity as needed.
It’s been a game changer for us.
Campfire was an old team chat service that was replaced with a larger suite of products called Basecamp. There is nothing strange or elite about that app, it was used for project management typically in digital firms.
I think you're right about communication. We never communicate by email, though we have a forum (using Loomio) for async. What you're saying reminds me of a post from basecamp where they discussed their internal communication tools, and were very critical of group chats — https://basecamp.com/guides/group-chat-problems I'll think about it and probably try to move towards better asynchronous communication. Thank you!
Thanks for having me :)
There are a lot of "but X can do this" feature requests. Drip sequences; A/B testing; transactional emails; the list goes on. To quote Getting Real:
> Beware of the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to web app development. Throw in every decent idea that comes along and you’ll just wind up with a half-assed version of your product. What you really want to do is build half a product that kicks ass.
> Stick to what’s truly essential. Good ideas can be tabled. Take whatever you think your product should be and cut it in half. Pare features down until you’re left with only the most essential ones. Then do it again.
I'm a one-man operation, and a not-even-full-time operation at that. I could never compete with, say, Mailchimp, which can throw dozens of engineers at a single feature.
When I get a feature request, I ask myself three questions:
- Is this something I would be excited about building if someone didn't ask me for it?
- Is this something I want to maintain in the codebase for the next three years?
- Is this something that makes the product worse for other Buttondown users?
If features don't pass all three questions, they generally don't get in. It's important that I keep Buttondown's biggest drawback — it's minimal surface area — also it's biggest competitive advantage. I have a lot of people not use Buttondown (or churn off of it) because of lack of feature parity, but that cohort pales in comparison to the folks who use it specifically because it has so few features.
Ehh, Kanban in IT is just weird scrum. I had a minor epiphany once I've saw what an actual Kanban "board" and "card" look like. Of course that works, but the fact that it works is incredibly grounded in the physical nature of reality in a way that's beautiful but loses something on the way to becoming integrated into ERP, and just becomes warped beyond all recognition once you try to use it in an IT project.
Of course, you can still work with it, but my preference is to either just stop using weird names of things people don't understand and stick to what you can expect with the basic Trello board, or go full cavewoman and do hill charts.
This, This, and This again. What do you want me as a visitor to do? Everything should point me in that direction. The theme matters insomuch as it does not distract me from the main purpose of the site. I have been to some plain sites that are excellent.
Check out the way 37 signals tells you about their product Basecamp.
Why not try something like https://www.optimizely.com/ and let the data tell you what works best. Recently I have been doing some marketing with FB ads and have found the difference between "hand-picked cafes" and "best cafes" actually has a 10% difference in conversions. There is no way I would have known this without trial and error and analytics. The Basecamp site https://basecamp.com/ has a great example of an effective call to action "Give Basecamp a try - it’s free for 60 days".
It sounds like you might've been thrown into being the PM without much warning. Take some time to learn a bit more about your new everyday responsibilities before you decide on the one tool that works best for you. A lot of products will have free trial periods to start. Here are a few to check out:
For project management software, I prefer Basecamp. I use Basecamp to-do lists with assigned due date to remind me to follow up on clients. It's also cleanly designed, easy to use, and works with Google Calendar. 60 day free trial doesn't hurt, either.
Perhaps a simple CRM system could work for you. Give Base a try. I've liked it for sales management when I'm dealing with a lot more clients and not as many deliverables. 14-day free trial.
If nothing else, if you work with your customers through email and use a gmail address, try Boomerang to start. I used to use it for all my follow ups. You can schedule any message to return to your inbox at a specific day and time as a reminder to reply or follow up on an older thread. Free Chrome/Firefox/Safari extension.
Not sure if you are looking for internal company brainstorming, in which case I would recommend Basecamp. Each individual can have their own login and control their notification settings.
If you are looking for a public corporate collaborative platform, my entrepreneurship professor recommended Salesforce to provide a collaborative platform. If you want to see an example of a Salesforce platform in action, MyStarbucksIdea uses Salesforce as their platform. Hope this helps!
There is also a good process created by base camp called shape up. there’s a free book on it. depending on your need this might be worth looking at. has some key concepts from agile as well. let me know how you like it. also if anyone else has used it i would be curious on your thoughts.
As I'm in this self-improvement purgatory as well for many years. However, that environment drove me to psychotherapy, where I learn to understand all those things better. Also that one of the reasons of my procrastination in that matter is I always feel not good enough to do something. That's why I'm trying to fight with my perfectionism - which was stated by my mother and grandma when I was a kid - but which actually isn't anything good.
Anyway, I've started to do some things for myself - like figure painting. Happily my 4yo son fell in love in NFS: Heat, so I have some time for myself - except the races, because I'm a better driver than he is :)
One more thing, guys from Basecamp wrote another book "Getting Real", which is IMO worth checking out (I'm really sorry if link are not allowed, but I just wanted to share)
This is Dropbox’s leveling guide. Click on the hamburger menu to see what is expected at each level. I know at least two of the BigTech companies’ guides are similar.
https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ic1_software_engineer.html
And Basecamp
https://basecamp.com/handbook/appendix-05-titles-for-programmers
Meni pomazu dosta sledece stvari
- Timer, postavim na 25 min i u tih 25 min maksimalno sam fokusiran i nedozvoljavam da me iko prekida
- Telefon na silent i sto dalje od mene
- Blokirane poruke, do not disturb
- Fokus na jednu stvar, bez skakanja na nesto drugo
- Pre samog featurea, ispisivanje na google docs-u, nesto slicno hill charts-u gde pisem sta su mi "problemi" i "pitanja"
- Task naravno koji dovoljno izazovan da me tera da se pomucim a sa druge strane ne pretezak Flow chart
Check out Basecamp (https://basecamp.com/). They have a free Personal tier to play around (and for smaller teams). It has a "chat" feature but it's not nearly as robust as Slack/Teams.etc.. but maybe it does the job for what you're needing. The project management aspect is straightforward (which is nice for non-tech-savvy users).
I'm mostly pointing out that it's odd to talk about how a couple of all-remote companies are 'doing very well' when the most famous one of its type -- one where the founders literally wrote a book on the topic, imploded in spectacular fashion this year.
With regard to whether it was caused by remote work or not, obviously there isn't a counterfactual there, but virtually every company is struggling with the politicization of internal discourse right now and it's a lot harder to assume good intent from a bunch of people you have never met or worked with in person.
Use a shared space online and make everyone aware that they should be checking it frequently. For example - https://basecamp.com/
One of the classic excuses is "I didn't know XYZ, no one told me"
Yes, that's what I was going for, but there are plenty of other things scrum does besides indicate that you're always meant to be sprinting that drag the philosophy down. Like the fact that you're supposed to track your 'velocity' across every sprint, even though you might be working on one incredibly difficult thing one sprint and simple bugs all the next sprint. And you must maintain this 'velocity' for all time. Or the fact that you have to constantly be reporting your status up and can't be trusted to get help if you need it. The whole point of scrum is 'don't trust the developers with anything, we must force them to always be reporting and keep an eye on them like children'.
Shape Up does none of that. You can read the whole philosophy here in an hour or so. https://basecamp.com/shapeup/webbook
Shape Up trusts people to get stuff done, and rewards them for it. Scrum punishes people for getting stuff done by making them get more stuff done. It also punishes testing (by encouraging velocity over a quality product).
Honestly I could complain about scrum for a long time. Even implemented correctly it fails. I moved companies so I don't use Shape Up anymore, but man I have seen the grass on the other side and it's so much greener.
Regarding this obsession on perfectionism, I like this short chapter from Getting Real.
https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/04.2-ignore-details-early-on
The tiny details can be fixed over time.
>Could you elaborate
Your examples probably do spin up a service per customer. Other DBaaS like firebase probably don't. When you say SaaS, I think of something like https://basecamp.com/. They have no reason to spin up a service per customer. They simply scale up services depending on the load, with a load balancer in front.
It looks like you have to pay for pro on Carrds to get the ability to connect with an email service. But how it would work is you sign up for mail chimp and create a form, then you go to your carrd page and place the form on the page, or if they have different instructions, use them. Then if someone enters their info into your form it gets sent to mail chimp and it creates a new contact for you that you can email when your service becomes available.
However, since it sounds like you already have a domain, you would (I assume), host your landing page on your domain and your actual SaaS is on a subdomain. For example, when I log into Basecamp it changes from Basecamp.com (the landing page) to a subdomain (3.basecamp.com), which is the nuts and bolts.
You can build a landing page relatively easy with Bootstrap for free and get an email form to place there for free too from the many email marketing providers.
The stuff from Ryan Singer and how he approaches web development is very valuable in my opinion.
Lecture about starting the dev process from a higher level
Live interface design (nice to seee his thought process in realtime)
If it's not too personal, what's the general subject line you are using? That can sometimes trigger the spam filter.
For example, lots of spam tries to look personal yet vague with a subject line like "Kindly get back to me" "Your order was scheduled" "Web proposal" "RE: Please confirm" "(no subject)" (I actually looked in my spam folder quickly to find these.)
If all else fails, maybe you could look into a simple Project Management tool like Basecamp.com to share revisions with your clients.
It seems Basecamp and its ilk try to improve on this. Kind of like an email replacement to manage B2B communications.
Of course the problem is you don't truly own the data.
The authors of Rework make a point about that: you should always try to find a way to sell your leftovers. They give the example of Henry Ford, who realized he could turn chunks of wood from the carving of parts into charcoal and sell it, eventually turning it into the Kingsford charcoal brand.
Getting organized can be extremely difficult especially when you're trying to envision long term goals or even planning a vacation, family reunion, birthday party etc. Putting everything in one place helps you coordinate your life and accomplish the things that need to get done so you have more time for the passion projects that really matter to you.There are many personal project management tools out there that can help you to remain organized and prepared at all times.
ClickUp - This intuitive software offers a number of modification options so that you can tailor it to work for you. It's designed to help you get things done, your way. The different views offered and impressive customer service makes it my number one choice for personal projects.
Basecamp - This simple tool's dashboard provides you with almost all the information related to your project, like a to-do list, documents, as well as events. However, it can be a tad bit too basic for my liking when planning any complex long term goals.
Wrike - This tool can assist you with understanding project requirements, create project plans, and schedules. This software may be a little too robust for what you're looking for.
I see where your frustration comes from, but relying on big lists and ongoing threads with attachments like this is kind of pushing the limits of what email is intended to do.
Your attachment solution sounds pretty workable, but realistically, rather than hoping for Google to make costly changes in long-expected standard email behavior, I'd try to get my peers on a useful collaboration platform. This kind of thing is one of the reasons tools like Groups, Basecamp, Slack, etc. were created.
So ein Projektmanagementsystem nutzen wir auch auf Arbeit. Nennt sich Basecamp, ist aber kostenpflichtig (min. 20$/Monat). Das hat auch To-Do-Listen, To-Do's (die man Nutzer zuweisen und Fristen setzen kann), Kalender die man frei anlegen kann usw.
Now get your mind of java. I'm too lazy to explain, but even though you can generate websites with Java, it is definitely not recommended, especially not for your use. People usually only generate websites with java, if they have no other choice, because it is integrated in their system. Like banks, hospitals, etc.
I'd like to be honest with you; I don't think you'll be able to pull this off, without developing further knowledge about php, or any other server side language. I recommend php for this case, because its the easiest to get started with. Of course you could pull all this off in ruby, node or python, as well as client side in javascript. But you need a bunge of already made tools and you need to plug them together.
I suggest you look for other tools, that could replace this issue. You have a specific solution in mind for a problem, that could be maybe solved differently. Most project management solutions do exactly what you need, like basecamp. (https://basecamp.com/)
I've been using collabtive for a while. http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/ - you can install this on your server, its not hosted.
Try to be open for other solutions to your problem, because even though you "only" need to plug some premade solutions together, there still is huge potential for frustration. And there is no need for this if you're not seriously interested in this topic.
Yes, BaseCamp is the best option.
>When you're working with a client, you don't necessarily want them to see all the work you do behind the scenes. Basecamp lets you create a client side to your project, to keep things off limits.
You can learn more here: https://basecamp.com/help/guides/projects/client-projects
It's also a great platform for team collaboration.
Damn, never though about this like that. Interesting question though - for software products, like https://basecamp.com/ is it possible to create a following in other Q&A sites like https://www.stackoverflow.com, or is it restricted to Quora and its notification system?
Ok, so you're not looking for a checklist plugin at all, you're looking for a project management plugin. That's probably why it's so hard for you to find.
Here are a few articles I found with a very quick Google search.
http://project-management.com/top-5-wordpress-project-management-plugins/
http://www.wpvirtuoso.com/6-best-free-wordpress-project-management-plugins/
Also, depending on your team size, and the needs for keeping this in house, you could even use a service such as Basecamp.
I guess I'm having trouble understanding what you have here. Reading your post it seems like you'll provide client liaison and project management services with personnel and software, as well as sourcing talent and potential clients, but I don't really see any evidence of these claims online. Looking at your website it seems that you're more focused on talent acquisition and pairing that with potential clients.
From a business standpoint, how do you intend to bring the talent to the paying customers? Are you going to use this platform as a way to "matchmake" connections between the two? Is it automated or hand-picked, and how do you plan on scaling this if it gets off the ground? Do you have a professional network robust and active enough to meet the need of your early adopters or are you hoping that you'll be able to bring clients and talent together as they come?
Assuming you won't want to share everything with a casual site visitor, it's still a little odd that there isn't much in the way of convincing besides the promise of connections and collaboration. No screenshots, product demos, testimonials, example completed projects, etc.
The "powerful networking, team management and platform tools" are a great idea but I don't see any screenshots or demos (on the mobile site). For a good example on how this is done I'd direct you to Basecamp. Are these up and running, in Dev, or an idea at this point?
Honestly if I were to encounter this website I'd think it was a scam, and I'd be wary of entering in any of my own personal or work information. I don't say this to discourage you, but I see all the "talk" but no sign of the "walk".
Edit: punctuation.
I like the six week cycle model that Basecamp and Shopify have landed on.
Check out Shape Up or this blog post by Shopify
I find this a decent middle ground between waterfall and an endless march of two week sprints.
Asynchronous work (which by definition is Remote work)... requires you use a system for status updates. There are many good ones.. I particularly like basecamp. My approach is .. set a metric for whether you meet. During QA ... it's if your sticky defect count is greater than 3.. we meet for example. Drive them to use the tool to update statuses and collaborate.
Engagement was used as an alternative for commitment. pick a fight/have an enemy".
It seems violent. But context is key. It simply means: show your superiority.
Engagement was used as an alternative for commitment. I'll probably change it to commitment. Thanks!
Preach. We're a very flexible, 6-person company and we've struggled to make things work. We rarely have hard deadlines, but it was still a constant mess of missed estimates, never knowing when projects would be done or when new ones could be started.
We tried Basecamp's Shape Up process, but it felt too sprint-y and rigid.
Finally, we rebuilt an internal project management tool we used many years ago as a consulting company. It let us restrict our project management process to a short bi-weekly meeting and 5-minute online updates and showed us, in real-time, the status and completion date of every project. It also outlines our available capacity and/or highlights when we've scheduled more work than we can handle. All these things were done before (ideally), they just took a lot more overhead to accomplish.
Now our process is totally flexible. The tool shows us immediately when we're going to go over our estimates/deadlines and then we can quickly decide if the tradeoff is worth it or not. We've gotten all the benefits of aggressive project management with none of the time costs. More time spent writing software.
If anyone's interested, we're exploring opening up the tool to others and are currently looking for beta testers. Feel free to message me or apply at Project Burndown.
I've run a fully remote business with my partner for the last 4 years. We've had remote contractors since the beginning based all over the world but from the end of last year/start of this year we have had 2 full time employees :)
I love 37signals/Basecamp's internal communication philosophies (actually, pretty much a fan of all the stuff they do): https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate I'd recommend giving it a read to see id you agree with any of it or to get ideas for how you'd like to communicate with your team.
If you want to have a fully remote team that also isn't in your timezone or if you want to allow your team to work at times of the day when they work best (not during typical 9-5 work hours), then asynchronous communication is the way to go.
Each to their own (maybe this works really well for the people in another person's comment's team), but I would absolutely hate to have my boss call me randomly during my work day to request tasks, even as the boss that sounds horrible - that sounds like it would be so disruptive. Imo that should be what instant messaging is for.
You will need to have decent processes in place or a good way of tracking project progress. Anyone working on a task should be able to see at any point what stage it's in or what still needs to be done so you can all work together effectively.
Our tech is just: - GSuite for emails/collaborative docs/storage/video meetings - Basecamp for project management & internal comms (there are cheaper options out there with more features - this just works for us) - Loom for screen recordings
In the following sentence, where the current system is a web app:
"Where in the current system does the new thing fit?"
More, specifically Singer's Shape Up, section Move at the Right Speed, paragraph 5, item 1
Ever considered working at Basecamp? They've got a great work culture, none of the faang bullshit from what I've read. They pay really really well and throw in a bunch of other stuff too.
We started using shape-up in our team (https://basecamp.com/shapeup). It has really worked wonders - features get built and released on time quite regularly.
As a developer, I also barely have any meetings, just time to focus and code. Highly recommend!
(note, I don't work at basecamp)
You very much do not want to model your practice off what a major tech company does. Those processes are designed for companies with infinite money and tens of thousands of employees; they will not work for you at whatever size you are that has zero process.
You might consider https://basecamp.com/shapeup as an option. It's not the only one.
Excuse the PM cliche but, how about you start with WHY -
Why do you need the estimates in the first place?
Well, maybe because you need planability and you need efforts to correspond with business priorities.
Where I work now, I implemented ShapeUp for this reason and it's been great because in ShapeUP it works the other way around - define the bsns priorities and plan the work accordingly, I'll explain:
The main advantage IMO is that you have full control over how much time is invested/spent on features.Usually, the answer is anywhere between 2 and 6 weeks. Then, your engineering team needs to come up with a version that fits the timeframe you set - sounds weird, I know, it takes time to get used to.
The main advantage IMO is that you have a full control for how much time is invested/spent on features.
Hope that helps!
Further reading:
https://basecamp.com/shapeup/shape-up.pdf
>As a product owner what are some key things I need to deliver to my team to make their life easier when building software?
Constant communication. It's really helpful when PMs/POs are there to always discuss:
- the outcome that a piece of work is trying to achieve and whether there's a quicker and easier way to achieve it. This is where that kick off meeting is really important
- what we can rule off as out of scope. Engineers can fall into this trap of considering every possible edge case known to mankind and stressing over it
- aligning expectations on how quickly something needs to be delivered, how thorough it needs to be, what are the nice to haves vs must haves.
- helping sequence work. This is mostly driven by an engineer but it helps when a PO is there to breakdown a large feature into smaller meaningful deliverables. Here's a great article on it
The team getting distracted sounds like they're trying to solve multiple things at the same time vs shipping on specific thing asap. Seeing the bigger picture unfortunately comes down to engineers not having good product acumen.
I might recommend you working using the Shape Up metod: https://basecamp.com/shapeup
It is super great at solvings a ton of the estimation problems and prevent things from dragging out.
I love that they use the word “appetite” for the effort/cost of a feature. It is so easy to figure out if things are going well because you up front determine the appetite for each feature.
Read the book (takes a few hours) and you will learn what otherwise will take you years of missery 😄👍
Deadlines are a sure fire way to ensure a bad end result with a lot of tech debt.
Instead you can employ some more modern methods of development. Like https://basecamp.com/shapeup/0.1-foreword this system is good because you can easily see how you're progressing accordingly and it's all about delivering value to the end user as fast as possible without sacrificing quality, the tradeoff is really asking yourself whether something is truly MVP or not. It forces product teams to pare down and encourages good development hygiene with time for things like testing and code review, which are usually after thoughts.
But like others have said its trust. It's unlikely that you'd have an entire team of poor performers, and usually the poor performers will get "ousted" over time as it's frustrating coding alongside them so other devs will eventually become vocal. So just make sure you're listening and then it's a game of people management.
Scrap deadlines.
I think it's very much possible and should be the standard to aim for. Most meetings are a signal of poor organization and gaps in the processes, imho.
Basecamp are know to be evangelists of asynchronous communication, among other things.
I'd like to recommend
- Russ Olsen's Design Patterns in Ruby
- Ryan Singer's https://basecamp.com/shapeup
- Sandi Metz' POODR
- Martin Fowler's Refactoring (Ruby Edition) https://www.martinfowler.com/books/refactoringRubyEd.html
- https://thoughtbot.com/upcase is a great resource
Senior devs do not lead teams at our company. Also, none of the criteria say one has to be supreme communicator. Here are criteria for Senior: https://basecamp.com/handbook/appendix-05-titles-for-programmers
I have a wiki page that talks about what I do, and one section currently looks like this:
Currently, I’m attempting to divide up my time like this:
- 20% - Shaping
- 50% - Building on the current Infra project
- 10% - Small tasks
- 10% - General learning and self-improvement
- 5% - Mentorship and sponsorship
- 5% - On-call tasks
Roughly, this is in perspective of a two-week sprint, so a 10% bucket is one that I try to spend one day a sprint on. This isn’t a strong commitment as needs vary week-to-week, but is the general goal.
The list of things and amount of time for each of them is something I built and then ran by my manager. When at the beginning of the day I'm thinking "what am I going to do today?", I look at what I have been doing recently and this list and use that to help make a decision about where my time should go that day. It also plays into capacity planning for sprints.
To note, this is time spent learning things that aren't in the pursuit of any immediate project (recently, reading books on agile processes, management, and leadership, and absorbing generally how dynamodb works). Learning for a specific purpose is part of that task (if it's small) or often part of the shaping process. You can see that only half of my time is set aside for what most people would think of as my job, but the rest actually is my job too and I believe in being upfront about that.
It's a super simple tool similar to Trello.com or somewhat even to Basecamp.com, but has some built-in features that these two lack – a built-in time tracker for one...
Their flat pricing is also nice...
This is it. WFH without a proper office is dirty and burning out. Find a coworking space now.
For those of you finding remote this hard, check this book https://basecamp.com/books/remote It lines up the basic WFH hygiene.
ADHD may be too, but a proper space for work is 100% sure burning you out and demotivating you.
ada beberapa orang yang message dan komen tentang how do you make saas.
gw saranin baca ini https://basecamp.com/gettingreal
dari segi teknologinya (tech debt) ga usah dipikirin, yang perlu dipikirin cuman acquiring customernya aja.
- Stay lean
- Always do pre-sales / pre-marketing before adding new features
- Don't quit your job
- Beta launch dalam 2 bulan (kalau ga bisa dalam 2 bulan, ya tinggalkan)
kalau bingung mau idenya mulai dari mana,
coba cari yang pasarnya besar di Indo, dan harganya bisa kalian tekan.
Contoh: POS yang tersedia dalam bahasa sunda, jawa dengan harga 80rb/bulan
targetnya kalian cuma 100 customer saja, itu udah ngasilin 8juta sebulan dan server paling 500rb.
We had previously used an agile methodology and would ship something maybe once every 4 weeks. Since adopting “Shape Up”Shape Up for product development, our shipping cadence is something meaningful once every few days. The cool thing about Shape Up is that you determine the appetite (how long you’re willing to spend on a solution) prior to commencing the sprint. So we can total a combined appetite to predict how much we’re going to be shipping in the sprint. Sometimes we allocate the entire sprint appetite to one solution. Which is totally fine.
I agree that high shipping cadences don’t necessarily result in shipping things of value.
37signals - Getting Real. https://basecamp.com/gettingreal
In particular, the section “Meetings are Toxic”. I have referenced this on a very regular basis to just about everyone I’ve worked with who thinks that they need to send me a meeting to discuss something. To the extent that I literally have a macro sending people to the online page for it. https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/07.3-meetings-are-toxic
In case anyone is wondering what ShapeUp is:
Book is free online, I'm going through it right now. My first impression is that it makes sense for particular industries or product lines, I'm going to have to think about how to apply this to my line of work (embedded DSP FW).
One simple idea is to not break problems down too finely right away, this is something I do quite a bit for the Jr members of my team. I should instead give them a kernel of a design idea (a raw idea that's been shaped) and let them break it down and file bugs/tasks. A huge chunk of my day is spent filing these tickets to break the work down, maybe I don't need to do that at all.
If you're looking for funding (you want a "startup") you'll need a technical partner or you won't be able to raise money. You can create a mockup and work on validating your idea as you're looking for one that's a right fit, you should read a bit about the lean startup methodology to see if this path interests you.
If you want to bootstrap the project it's absolutely fine to build it yourself, but the way you learn is that you learn by doing - learn a bit, apply, learn a bit, apply - you don't need to take a year and make a career switch just to build a small web app. There are frameworks and tutorials online that will help you set up and get things done quickly.
Considering reading make book if this approach interests you.
If you want to learn to code anyway, go through some bootcamp - they are quick and functional.
Either way, from your post I can tell you're missing out on a crucial part - which is understanding what the most minimal version of your marketplace looks like (MVP), and validating your idea. For marketplaces this can be as simple as a landing page leading to a slack group or discord account. No programming needed. Just prove that there are buyers and sellers that need help connecting and are willing to pay for it. You can even accept money without writing a single line of code.
If you find that learning to manage the development of digital product is more important to you than learning how to build it and that you prefer hiring/partnering up with developers, consider reading things like Shape up.
I prefer to structure my terms similar to Basecamp.
New accounts and renewals always have an opt out, but it's very pragmatic and easy to manage from the customer service/support side.
we don't use Scrum, but Shape Up framework https://basecamp.com/shapeup
based on the book, there is no manager, each person should able to manage their own selves
maybe I've chose wrong team management framework
we don't use Scrum but the Shape Up framework, split into two teams
I've been collecting a list of all activities and resources we can all use to help people grow. Would you be willing to share your collection of curated resources?
I think chunking out work and sequencing it by risk or opportunity can be one of the hardest things to teach. I think ShapeUp tries to teach a bit of this in their scopes section.
Hi,
I highly recommend a book from Basecamp guys called 'Getting real'. It's free online or as a PDF → https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/getting-real.pdf
There are several suggestions, such as:
- to start in epicenter
- to solve own problem
- to produce a painkiller instead of vitamin
You'll read it in two evenings, and it has all you need to start.
Wow, that sounds incredible tiring. If you ever have a chance to change the way they work, I recommend trying shape up.
Started using it in a team I joined, and really see features being built well, and a very empty calendar to just focus and write code.
Hey have a look at the shape up methodology. In some product companies when the user story is too abstract its difficult to interpret. What you're facing right now maybe a shaping issue: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.1-chapter-02
Have you looked into ShapeUp? We’ve moved to it over 8 or so months ago.
It gives engineers more freedom (to some extent) on a solution to be completed in a fixed time frame. One of the issues we had with scrum are forever projects. Things would go on forever and never really end.
With shapeup Product Managers focus pitches on describing a problem, and a proposed solution workflow. Not a screen mock to translate from page to site. It gives engineers the ability to solve the problem and not be told how to do it.
The crux is that the solution must fit into the timeframe of 6 weeks. That’s the “appetite” that product have to solve this problem. “Shaping” must be done prior to the pitch being given to a team so that we know for the most part it can be done within an estimated time frame.
It’s been a good process for us. Some learning curves but overall better than all the scrum/agile. Ceremonies.
Also every cycle team is self governing and sets up their own workflows/meeting cadence, etc.
Raport looks great, and I think a single paid plan would work to get going with. Frankly, I would price based on the value your product is offering, not a MRR goal. Then you'll have to reverse engineer your price point to set user acquisition goals.
Since you want to offer one free & one paid plan I would model Basecamp in terms of structure. Based on what I gather from the landing page and messing around with the product a bit, I'd personally charge around $49~ m although I'd probably raise it overtime. Your ideal customer has the money to spend and should easily be able to justify the time/cost savings of consolidating multiple tools. For customers wherein this is a bit out of their range, there's always your free tier, and you could offer a startup discount as well (example). This would also mean you may not have to offer a free trial, or as long of trial, reducing churn while still keeping CAC low.
Good luck!
Perfect is the enemy of good. The best thing I’ve found is to completely stop attempting to optimise your code for reuse and instead optimise for deletion.
Actively avoid coupling components together or using abstractions as much as is reasonably possible. This keeps the parts of your system simple, easy to understand in isolation, and most importantly easy to replace with completely new and improved versions later on if/when your requirements change.
You might also find reading shape up valuable, the author goes over how to break a project down into small deliverable slices.
Some years ago the team I was then part of at work all decided to jointly read ‘Rework’ by Jason Fried (of Basecamp / 37signals). I’d already read it so I was spared the drudgery of being quizzed about how far I’d read each day lol.
As much as I find those kind of group activities a bit sickly, I do like the book and it makes some valuable points about meetings (that I think were even more poignant at its time of release when very few people seemed to consider actually changing any of this stuff in their business).
This summary says it better than I could…
“Meetings, the right way… Meetings generally are so vague they never have a goal. Your meeting should have a timer, when it rings, the meeting is over. Invite as few people as possible, and have a clear agenda. Begin with a specific problem, and meet at the site of the problem. Point to real things, and begin with a specific problem. Create a “JUDO” approach, this is when you find a simple solution to a complex problem, even if its not perfect don’t worry because you can always turn good into great later on.” - Summary from ‘18 things learnt from Rework’ blog post on Medium by Milan Amin
I know that everyone does 3-tier but.... you can be both competitive AND stand out from the crowd of your competitors.
I life Basecamp's pricing: https://basecamp.com/pricing
You can get inspired by it, and it works very well for them.
Marco is someone I probably wouldn’t listen to here. Just saying design patterns is something only juniors talk about is enough to disqualify him IMHO. He is a successful one-person company, but that doesn’t mean much in terms of engineering practices.
Siracusa is probably the only one who gave useful advice here but I felt there wasn’t enough detail other than differences in positions.
To the OP, I like quoting Basecamp’s handbook, as it gives a nice summary of what is expected from an engineer at each level
https://basecamp.com/handbook/appendix-05-titles-for-programmers
The last book I read was Getting Real by Basecamp.
It's a book on how the makers of the famous project management app, Basecamp make web apps. But it's not about the how-tos and specific steps, rather about the general overall principles and thought-process behind making little decisions and workflows.
I'm currently reading Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a World of Specialists. Which is an interesting take that disproves the deliberate practice and 10,000hr rule made famous by Tiger Wood's story. I'm a generalist myself, and this book made me confirm I'm doing the right thing and not spreading myself too thin.
Now, why I want to read A Brief History of Time:
As a generalist, I'm curious about a lot of topics and theoretical physics is one of them. But most of my physics textbooks are boring and far from inspiring. Walter Lewin's lectures helped but this book seems to be a perfect way to inspire my curiosity and get me more interested.
:)
Nice list! And I would like to share my Top 3 Productivity Apps:
- Traqq Time-tracker - time tracking for remote or local teams
- Basecamp - For project management
- Slack - For team communication and collaboration
I actually think scrum and shape up handle tasks/projects in a very similar (coming from someone who does scrum).
In scrum you'd have the PO prioritise features and assign a project to the scrum team (the sprint goal). The team would then create the tasks and complete them as part of the sprint.
Shape up seems to be similar in that you assign a project to a team that they'll work on for 6 weeks. It's up to them to split it up into tasks and work through them as a team.
I've never used shape up before though so let me know if that's not been your experience!
https://basecamp.com/shapeup/3.1-chapter-10#assign-projects-not-tasks
I've mentored new remote developers over the whole of my development career (since early 2001), it is very possible to do. A neat book about it came out a few years ago, have a read : https://basecamp.com/books/remote
Maybe the City you live in shouldn't have sold its soul to more sandwich shops and had more reason to go there. Like entertainment venues, clubs, experiences. The High Street is changing, not because of the pandemic (although that might have accelerated it), it will need to adapt. Maybe shutting down all those entertainment and social spaces in order to sell to property developers to put in another five identikit lunch stops was a bad idea in the end.
This is a GREAT economic opportunity, removing the geographic constraints for work, allows people to live and act more locally. It is no surprise that local shops have seen a massive increase in trade over the last eighteen months, as the large mega stores and city center locations suffered. Culturally this is a great opportunity too, less time commuting, more time to indulge ones interest and hobbies, in a MORE connected way.
​
There is a wealth of opportunity right now, the genie is out the bottle now, you can try and be ask backwards as you like, but it is probably better to work towards forging a future that is enriched by the new ways of working, rather than pine for something that was never very good to start with, just because it was the status quo.
An existing team member, or a new hire, has to take on the role of prioritizing features (and dropping them when the cost outweighs the benefit).
There's a gap in communication.
If you're unable to convince management to have someone on the business side take on the role, then you either you take it on or just learn to love it as it is.
Sidebar: An interesting alternative to typical 1-2 week sprints is Shape Up, by Basecamp: https://basecamp.com/shapeup. It might help you see the communication/decisions that's lacking more clearly.
Days are quite different depending on what's in play at the moment.
I spend a lot of time on product - thinking, shaping (https://basecamp.com/shapeup), sketching, writing, dreaming up future versions of what we're doing now. And then guiding day to day design, UX oversight, etc. I don't write HTML/CSS much anymore, but I work closely with designers to hone in on the right designs. Lots of riffing, editing, etc.
And then there's all the other stuff - the business stuff, hiring, setting the tone, special projects, hiring leadership/execs, etc.
I'm of course biased towards the style embedded in the software we sell but leaving that aside here are some things that worked for me in the past:
- As you describe just get team approval for stories / projects ahead of time. One of our competitors describes such a system https://basecamp.com/shapeup but I wasn't that fancy - just had project email / meeting kickoffs to get approval.
- Working alone or in very small groups (the risk here though is that you don't have enough people to collaborate with and that did end up biting me sometimes).
- Any kind of a continuous flow methodology that does not involve too many meetings.
- Modified Scrum - you can read #noestimates articles but basically get rid of the story points and just make sure to have a prioritized backlog larger than can be done in one sprint.
If you want more on the Uclusion way you can contact me from the website.
1) It's not if you can provide enough value that customers want to pay for it. Plus you can acquire them too. A lot of times a free plan is really used to acquire customers more than just offer a service for free forever.
2) Enterprises aren't price-sensitive, typically. That being said that strategy could work if your marketing goes up against more expensive competitors. Basecamp is a decent example of doing this well. They "show" you the problem with so many tools and explain why consolidating is better AND cheaper for you. https://basecamp.com/before-and-after
Why the f everyone is obsessed on painting this issue as anti-union conspiracy? The employees in question were paid more than 200K per year in a relaxed and fully remote environment. They had many benefits only typical in FAANG companies and also worked only 4-days weeks on summer.
I REALLY doubt it anyone wanted to unionize.
Basecamp's Until the End of the Internet policy would let existing customers continue to use HEY even if they decided to stop development and taking new customers.