How an early feature was born
While we were in the throes of developing the first version of DoneDone, sometimes features would arise through nothing more than a quick Basecamp note. No meetings. No weighing of priorities on a Kanban board. Just a simple thought.
As any company grows up, this fluidity is lost for good reason — not the least of which is developer sanity. But, I look back on those really early days of processless development with fondness.
Before building DoneDone, our team used another issue tracker for a client project that we all found difficult to use. One of its major deficiencies was the inability to consolidate a list of issues our team pushed out for testing into an email to the client. Instead, our project manager Lindsay would write a daily email to the team, noting which issues were ready for testing.
Craig reminded us of the pain in a short message.
As it turned out, this feature never made it to our “Second Phase Ideas.” Instead, it became a core feature we promoted on an initial series of blog posts leading up to our launch.
Nearly 24,000 release builds have been made since launch. We all have Craig’s reminder to thank for this.
