Getting Real
Posted by meero on December 2, 2006
Thanksgiving weekend has been pretty cold in Washington, so I took advantage of my lazy holiday and grabbed a copy of “Getting Real”, 37Signal’s book on agile web development. The book actually blew me away with its simplistic, yet effective approach to summarize many of the lessons I learned the hard way. I didn’t put the book down until I was done with it, and it was a true holiday treat!
37Signales is a small group of web wizards producing the best set of simple, yet effective, project management tools I have ever worked with. The beauty of these products emerges from their ability to be perfectly minimalistic and task centered. Every product is a self contained set of basic functionalities that solves one problem. Whether it’s business chat, to-do list or collaborative writing, the creators of these power applets are strong believers in empowering users to do more by giving them less features. And they are right! Despite the availability of hundreds of note taking applications and PIMs, my favorite application is notepad, because it provides a free-form canvas for me to define my own layout, keywords, etc… and worry only about the contents of the file and where I am saving it. What enabled notepad to be this powerful to me is the freedom that it gives me to dump my thoughts without worrying about fonts, bullets, colors… My second favorite note taking application is OneNote, and it comes second to notepad since it’s got too many features that I don’t usually use. You can think of 37Signals products as one giant product with a pay-per-feature option.
The book strongly advocates the concept of “less is more”, by working it through both the development process (less rules, less routine, less meetings, and less specs), as well as the final product (less options and less features). While I strongly believe that this approach works perfectly in small teams and startups, it would have been interesting for Jason Fried to talk more about what large companies should do to “Get Real”.
Cheers,
Amir
Links:
- Getting Real, the book (They have a free online version!)
- 37Signals
- Signal vs. Noise, 37Signal’s blog
- Video of Jason Fried’s talk at CTC’06
