How Basecamp uses Basecamp Notes

how-basecamp-uses-basecamp.md

How Basecamp uses Basecamp

Recording: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/574380757

• Points out that nothing has changed with them now WFH; they've always worked this way,
• HQ is equivalent of a company intranet: docs, files, discussions, etc. Every one has access,
• Teams are like departments or groups: distinct workspaces for the given team, admin gets to choose who sees what; unless you're added they're hidden,
• Everything is "commentable": you can discuss things in context on every item,
• DHH points out that they come back to these; sometimes two years later, giving the example of a an AB test,
• Everything item exists under a URL; it's always referencable,
• In general, Basecamp has most people in every teams,
• They have a combination of different types of projects: some are social (e.g.: about cars), some are general (e.g.: NY office team), specific (e.g.: rework podcast),
• The focus on teams is driven from the idea of improving written communication,
• Jason Fried makes a point about how often he sees David: about 3 times a year, video chat every few weeks. Everything is driven through Basecamp,
• They have a lot of projects,
• They break them down as small as they possibly can

HQ

• "Announcements" are used for things everyone must be notified about,

• Campfire just social here,

• they don't usually use the calendar,

• documents is names "Reference Materials" (contains stuff on expensing, logos, health insurance, etc),

• email forwards (contains their "Fan Mail"),

• checkins are personal/social (e.g.: "What did you do this weekend?", "Seen any good movies lately?", "What are you reading?"),

• How to build a culture at a remote company? You provide an environment for people to do the social bit; sociable check-ins provide that (e.g.: "oh! you're reading the same book as me!"),

• If you click on someone's name in a thread (like Check-ins), you can see all of the responses by that person. DHH uses it to write up a yearly list of all of the books he's read,

• 5x12: an hour video chat between five people every month across the company and then it's transcribed and put in a folder,

Teams (showing The Rework Podcast Team)

• To-dos are setup one per podcast episode, with checkboxes for each task,
• Docs & Files has bits of music, an example show outline, etc,
• email in feature is done with Google Voice pushing in Voicemails,
• When you're working on something, you need somewhere reliable to put things: e.g.: when you have multiple different places, you don't know where to look first,
• In Projects: Shows the Hey.com sign up flow project; only has a message board, to-dos and Campfire. The project started with a Shaping doc (explaining what the project is about, not tasks, that's up to the team), each to-do list is a chunk of work (programming work, design work, QA, etc), all of their work is mixed together, there's no specific lists for different team members,
• DHH: "How do commits match todos?", they don't, that's busy work. If it's important, someone will link it,
• Similarly, Campfire supports posting GitHub PRs automatically: it's not that valuable and creates noise (presumably based on the assumption people get to it eventually?)
• There's then a demo of Hill Charts: the left-hand side is unknown, right-hand side is known things. The team gets to decide where the items are on the hill (super powerful: todo count doesn't equal position of progress)
• DHH: the thing with todo items is that at the start you add some, then get going, but then you add a load more. Towards the end it's a case of just checking off the items. You never know how much work there is until you're a good way through it,
• Every new release of the Basecamp iOS app gets it's own project,
• Haystack; original codename for hey.com,
• Opt-J allows you jump around to anything in Basecamp,
• JF: In a company, people like to know what's going on. But, having people check multiple places is chaotic, slow, inefficient and people don't know where to find it (I'd also add: stressful)
• They show off the "What Works" project. There's one for every year and the idea is to collect together everything that people are working on across the company,
• The philosophy is that people don't need to know absolutely everything in detail, but people do care about what's going on,
• It can be used to provide a narrative of the work: some to-dos might take three weeks to check off and this is where you can talk through it and share what you learned,
• Automatic check-ins:
  • Monday morning, 9am: "What will you be working on this week?"
  • Friday afternoon, 4:30pm: "What have you worked on?"
  • For JF, it's a rough summary of the work from the perspective of Monday morning. It's ideas, not what's absolutely going to happen,
  • Each individual does it differently: some check-ins are one line, some are paragraphs, some are bullet points,
  • These aren't about to-dos, it's about conversation in someone's own words,
  • It encourages cross-team collaboration: e.g.: if you're stuck on something, someone from another department might chime in and say that they've hit the same problem earlier one,
  • It's a point of reflection: sometimes it's a case of having a shitty day and so it's worth writing that out
• Message board:
  • Used for cycles and kick offs,
  • This provides a higher level overview of what's going on,
• In general, certain sections can be hidden from a group of users: e.g.: for inviting clients in

Questions

How much work should be within a team, vs. spinning it off into a project?

• Project work should be done in project, higher-level things would be discussed in the team,
• If what you're trying to do can be summarised in one todo item? It should be in the team. If not, it should be a project. Maybe it should be a new project

When does Basecamp use the built-in calendar vs. other solutions?

• Historically, they've used Google Calendar for vacation time. They now have a project for it (called Out), with only scheduled turned on
• They don't have (deliberately) a groupware calendar setup: you can't see someone else's schedule. To schedule a meeting, you have to do it the old fashioned way: talk to them and find a time

Does Basecamp use Google Apps?

• Company as a whole has been moving off Google Apps,
• But still uses Sheets/Docs/etc now and then,
• Basecamp has strong integration for it,

How do you do work leading up to a pitch/deadline asynchronously?

• Points to Shaping,
• By the time a pitch is ready, it should already be well thought through,
• Typically this will be done by one person, who does all of the deep thinking,
• DHH: you don't get to all of this deep thinking in a group,
• The example pitch walks through the product design workflow: sketches, followed by more detailed flows,
• DHH: In a pitch, the idea is enough to give a programmer enough context to understand if something is possible (and get them excited about it?), so they can tell if it's a very big project or something quite possible,
• DHH: often, design/development discussions can be heated, working with something real gives you something to discuss around, understand perspectives, possibilities and tradeoffs; talking more around these is the best way to get through these heated discussions

Lots of people right now are hiring temporary workers; how would you deal with that?

• Create a new company called "Contractors" and deliberately add them to individual projects, you can remove them from Basecamp when they're done with the project and their work will still be there