A culture of creation

I was asked recently why it seemed as though 37Signals did nothing BUT create interesting products, and quickly at that. Interestingly, my answer came quickly and I suspect it is not far from the truth. 37Signals has made the act of creation a goal, and not just something that you do on the way to achieving your goal. The company is organized to encourage and support the creative process from its core. The company systematically gets out of the way of people being able to pursue an idea and encourages a high level of productivity in all sorts of unusual™ ways (4 day work week, everyone gets a company credit card, they pay for your hobbies). The result is new products/features released frequently, and a feedback loop that gives them the insight necessary to improve and create even newer products and features that solve customer problems.

With so many opportunities out there, it seems as though there are far too many companies taking the classic growth path.

1. You create a winning product. HOLY CRAP that was hard! Pat yourself on the back.
2. You listen to your users and slowly add all of the features that they request. People love it! If only you added a toaster oven, 1,000 more people would loooove it.
3. You hire more people to support/develop the product
4. You make it more and more mainstream. Change the color scheme! We hear that people like the Windows XP color theme; use that. My great Aunt that lives on a farm can use it now, phew!
5. You rake in the dough as you watch your market share deteriorate in favor of competitors who are addressing specific market needs that you can’t address.

The problem for most of the companies like this is that somewhere along the way, they forgot how to make a remarkable product. Think Napster, Yahoo, and a thousand other offerings that started off with fanfare, users at the edges, and quickly moved to the middle. They start “managing” and “maximizing” and avoiding the hard truth that they are slowly losing touch with the ability to identify and exploit a market need. This is the same point at which many of those organizations start to experience management challenges like turnover in key employees and lack of motivation.

Copilot, as a service, has moved toward the middle. Copilot is still the easiest of any of the services to use, but what it does has been comoditized by a dozen years of technological development. The industry is crowded with huge competitors and everyone is doing the same thing. Feature creep is on the rise. Developers are being hired into the industry by the bucketful. If this product category isn’t already completely ordinary, it is about to be.

So far, we have avoided the desire to keep adding features to “keep up” with our competitors at the cost of disenfranchising our customers who appreciate the simplicity of our offering. But what still makes it remarkable? The day pass pricing model combined with the ease of use make Copilot the best choice for ad-hoc remote support. But, what do we need to do to double the number of customers? More features? A New product? We’re working on that now, and you can track our progress here: Air Traffic – A blog about Fog Creek Copilot and running a company within a company.

If you will “never catch up by being the same“, what can you do to jump ahead? Build a culture of creation. Realize that ideas come from unexpected sources at strange times, and be prepared to take small risks often to get concrete feedback on what works and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t.

Here are a couple of the practical things that I am doing now to try to build a personal and collegial culture of creation:

1. Create a todo list and use it. Software can help here, and I recommend Things. The todo list isn’t a single running list. It is a backlog, a list of next things, and a list of today’s things. Think digestible.
2. Shorten projects and lengths of activities. Projects no longer than a few weeks (two to four); tasks no longer than a few hours. Think MOMENTUM.
3. Raise individual accountability by feeding back progress of project participants through clear concise communication. Think Scrum.
4. Release stuff often. Get it to customers. Even if you are worried that it isn’t perfect. If it solves a real problem, early adopters will help you make it better.

I will let you know how it goes…