Status Check

This is an update of an old blog post I originally wrote 3 and half years ago while I was living in Brussels. At the time I wrote it I was heavily under the Basecamp influence. What has changed for us since March 2013?

We still use Basecamp for small projects and Harvest for time tracking, estimates and invoices. We replaced Campfire with Slack and we try to stay off e-mails as much as possible.
In terms of people we are now 8 people living in 6 cities in Europe. Our usual work day starts when logging in to Slack and saying hello to the other guys in the HQ room. We then each proceed with our tasks for the day and in the early afternoon we hold short project meetings and agree on next steps.

For bigger projects we use Trello boards, for wireframes we use Axure, we use Dropbox for Buisness to store all the files that we need, we use Dropbox Paper for scribbling together while being on a Skype call if we need video or Slack for audio calls.

All these tools help us bridge the lack of physical presence but we still like to meet about 3 times a year to combine work and fun. This year we met in the Bulgarian mountains in February for some skying and snowboarding,

We went to a remote Hungarian village for a week during the summer and worked together on a new internal project,

and in October we went to Berlin to drive Trabants.

We got better at many things in the last few years. We are able to estimate projects a lot more accurately. We do this by fragmenting them to much smaller chunks.

We managed to explain to our clients that we should first aim at building a minimal viable product rather than something that no one knows how to work with and add all the bells and whistles to it.

We built our best products to date. We are finalising case studies for 3 of them that we will add to our website.

We also learned to say “No” more often. I guess this comes with the experience and the self confidence. There is still a long way to go but I feel we are getting closer..