Your company is a product It all begins with this idea: Your company is a product. Yes, the things you make are products (or services), but your company is the thing that makes those things. That’s why your company should be your best product. Like in product development, progress is achieved through iteration. If you want to make a product better, you have to keep tweaking, revising, and iterating. The same thing is true with a company. But when it comes to companies, many stand still. They might change what they make, but how they make it stays the same. They choose a way to work once and stick with it. Whatever workplace fad is hot when they get started becomes ingrained and permanent. Policies are set in cement. Companies get stuck with themselves. But when you think of the company as a product, you ask different questions: Do people who work here know how to use the company? Is it simple? Complex? Is it obvious how it works? What’s fast about it? What’s slow about it? Are there bugs? What’s broken that we can fix quickly and what’s going to take a long time? A company is like software. It has to be usable, it has to be useful. And it probably also has bugs, places where the company crashes because of bad organizational design or cultural oversights. 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. We work on projects for six weeks at a time, then we take two weeks off from scheduled work to roam and decompress. We didn’t simply theorize that that would be the best way to work. We started by working on things for as long as they took. Then we saw how projects never seemed to end. So we started time-boxing at three months. We found that that was still too long. So we tried even shorter times. And we ended up here, in six-week cycles. We iterated our way to what works for us. We didn’t just assume asynchronous communication is better than real-time communication most of the time. We figured it out after overusing chat tools for years. We discovered how the distractions went up and the work went down. So we figured out a better way to communicate. We didn’t start with a calm approach to salary negotiations, we worked our way here. Setting salaries and granting raises was as stressful at 37signals as it is at most other companies. Until we iterated our way to a new method. We work on our company as hard as we work on our products. People often toss a version number at the end of software. “This is iOS 10.1, 10.2, 10.5, 11, etc. . . .” We think of our company in the same way. Today’s 37signals, LLC, is like version 72.3 of 37signals, LLC. We got here by going there, trying that, and figuring out what works best. Running a calm company is, unfortunately, not the default way to run a company these days. You have to work against your instincts for a while. You have to put toxic industry norms aside. You have to recognize that “ It’s crazy at work” isn’t right. Calm takes conscious effort. Our company is a product. We want you to think of yours as one, too. Whether you own it, run it, or “just” work there, it takes everyone involved to make it better. — via basecamp.com/books/calm