Do we track time?

Once the cycle has been defined, and work grouped into Big Batch and Small Batch projects, I write up an announcement and post it to the “Building BC3” project inside Basecamp. The Building BC3 project is the master project for high-level Basecamp-related product work. It’s where we talk big pict...

There are two people on our QA team. They roam between ongoing projects, invited in by the teams when they want something checked and double-checked. We’ve found that the earlier they’re involved the better. QA fits into the six-week time frame too, so nothing busts a deadline like a pile of last...

Roughly every six weeks we start a new cycle of product work. Each six-week work cycle contains two types of projects: 

• Big Batch projects are big features or stuff that’s probably going to take up the full six weeks to get doneWe typically take on between 4 and 8...

If we take on two big batch projects during a cycle, we’d have one team working on one of the projects and another team working on the other. A team is two or three people, depending on the type of work. Either one programmer and one designer, or two Programmers and one designer. That’s it. No te...

We don’t have distinct time set aside to come up with ideas. There’s not a distinct set of people who come up with all the ideas. Ideas come from all over and are offered up any time. They come from us, they come from customers. Ideas are always in motion. There’s always a bubbling ocean of ideas...

Why don’t we pitch in person? For a few reasons: 

• The person who’s making the pitch can’t be interrupted.
• Further, we believe writing things out makes you consider them at a deeper level. 
• Real-time communication forces synchronization of schedules.
• Al...

The designer on the team leads the project, but there’s a very close working relationship between designer and programmer (s) they work together on everything. When everything’s in one place, everyone knows where things are, where things stand, etc.

The secret to making this possible is something we call scope hammering.

Scope hammering takes the chisel to the big block of marble and figuring out how to Sculpt, nip, and tuck a feature into the best Six-Week version possible. Before any project is included in a cycle, we’ve already figu...