The Assemble Method 1.0
Creativity is messy.
It’s a quote that reverberated in my mind from one of the earliest episodes of our podcast, in an interview with the Chief Creative Officer of Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Margaret Johnson. If anyone knows anything about managing creativity, it’s her.
This philosophy has largely driven the product development process for Assemble since it’s inception. Yes, we understand creativity is messy. But Assemble is here to clean up.
In this manifesto, we outline the principles behind Assemble, so that you can understand how to best utilize the tool in your organization. Hopefully by reading this, our decades of experience in creative and product roles will help you improve your own process and team productivity.
1. Software needs to take a stance
Fully customizable solutions that let you change every single imaginable variable in the interface or code are a waste of your time. It’s not your job to build beautiful software that perfectly suits your needs. That’s our job. So we believe that software needs to take a stance and give you a clear direction on how you should organize your process.
Productivity tools should be carefully crafted to give you the exact functionality you need to do your job, while stripping away everything that you don’t or won’t need. Nothing more, nothing less.
Your time is better spent perfecting your own process. Not building software.
2. Software should be lego bricks
With that being said, software can not be too opinionated or it risks becoming limiting, alienating users who find it unsuited for their needs. In this sense, we believe in building software that gives you lego blocks — a set of features that fit nicely together, but can be used and constructed for any use case possible.
An early example of this comes from our company’s start serving the film industry. Many people wanted a way to upload actor options and choose the best option for a role. It would have been easy for us to create a “casting” feature purpose built for this customer request. But this feature would have been limiting and would have alienated other users such as designers or architects.
So we went back to first principles — what are our customers really looking to do when they say they want to choose an actor for a role? They simply want to add creative options to Assemble in a unified collection and have the ability to approve or shortlist those options.
Who else needs to add options and approve or shortlist those options? Almost any creative role we can imagine.
And thus Submissions was born. A unique feature that enables you to upload submissions (of anything) into a collection and manage the approval process.
This is one example of how we think about software as Legos.
3. Remove everything you can and see what re-surfaces
As a general rule for productivity, cutting as much as possible from your routine and seeing what re-surfaces will help you identify what’s important and what’s not.
We feel the same way about building products. We constantly strive to keep the product interface as minimalistic and simple as possible.
In fact, it’s our goal that as the product gets more feature rich, the interface will become less cluttered.
4. Only four steps in the hierarchy
In Assemble, all of your data is organized into a four step hierarchy. Nothing more, nothing less:
- Projects
- Phases
- Tasks
- Subtasks
We have intentionally limited this hierarchy to four steps, and will likely never change it. While some tools offer sub-subtasks, sub-sub-subtasks and many other levels of organization, we believe that four steps gives you and your team everything you need, while forcing you to simplify your processes if they’ve become too complex.
5. Projects are for anything
Assemble is a project based project management system. Therefore the first level of the hierarchy is projects, and creating a project is the first step you take to begin organizing your work.
However, the definition of a project can sometimes sound limiting. To be clear, projects are simply a collection of related data. In this sense, projects can be:
- A project with a clear start an end date
- A project with no end date, such as an ongoing campaign
- A department in your organization, such as sales or marketing
- A personal space to organize your thoughts
- Anything else you can imagine
Don’t let the word project limit your imagination.
6. We believe in a fresh start
When starting a new tool, there’s a natural urge to want to migrate everything from the old tools you may have been using before.
Our advice: don’t.
Successful organizations must constantly re-invent themselves. And a new tool is an opportunity to disrupt your old way of thinking. It’s an opportunity to audit your process, simplify, remove things, and see what breaks.
By starting with a clean palette, you can create new paradigms that will improve your process and accelerate your team’s velocity.
Not to mention, it just feels better.
P.S. to be clear, we don’t recommend deleting all of your old projects. Keep them backed up somewhere.
7. Building process is a process
A process is like a living, breathing organism that is constantly growing and maturing as the team improves around it.
Therefore, you shouldn’t feel overwhelmed when starting to build a process from scratch.
Take small steps. Build the basic outline of your one or two most common project types, and templatize them for your team.
As your team begins to use these templates, they will add or change or remove things and slowly it will improve with time. Your team will build the process together. When this happens, update your template along the way to capture all of these improvements.
Your processes will grow with your organization, getting better every day.
Just like our customers continually update our process, so do we. We expect to continue adding, cutting, updating and improving this manifesto over time as we continue to get better and learn more from you.
