(2010-01-10) 37signals Team Structure

After a less-structured history, Thirty7 Signals is structuring as a couple Teams. Each team will stay together for two months (a “term”). When two months are up, the teams split up and form again with different people. This way everyone gets to work with everyone else. During the two month term, there will be four Iteration-s. An iteration lasts for two weeks. An iteration can tackle one feature, a variety of smaller features, or part of a bigger feature that will require multiple iterations to complete. Each team will be asked to work on the same product for the full iteration.

Mar03 update: The goal is to drastically cut down scope, set short fixed deadlines, and focus on improving our products... It went incredibly well. It was the most productive two month period we’ve had in a long time... Since we believe in designing the interface first, we ultimately found it made sense for the programmers to take on a few small tasks or bug fixes on the first Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of an iteration while the designer was working on the UI for the first big feature of the iteration.

Nov update: After an iteration is deployed, teams now go into a cooldown phase — something we didn’t have originally. This means team members go into support mode and deal with issues related to the deploy and any general concerns coming back from the Support team. That means fixing bugs, revising copy in the help section and/or email responses, and responding to queries at our Answers forum. There’s no set length for this phase since you can’t plot exactly how it will play out. So we wait and see. We only assume the latest deploy is good to go once Support is in the clear for 6-12 hours... Also, we’ve added a role for project “scribe.” There’s one on each team and that person’s responsibility is to keep everyone else informed of what’s happening. The scribe posts a summary at the beginning and end of each iteration explaining what’s being tackled, what we got done, what issues arose, what delays occurred, etc. When everyone knows what’s going on with everyone else, the company feels more connected.

• Despite the efforts to be inclusive, the old structure left some people feeling like the decision-making was left in the hands of just a few. They worried about feeling more like consultants or outside “the core” of decision making. So that led to our new Iterations app. It’s a teamwork app that we built and use internally where everyone can post ideas, share them, have a permalink, leave comments, and let rough ideas ripen. 2010-11-16-37signalsIterationsPrioritization