![]() ![]() Yes, remote working can be great for many things, but not for speed and efficiency of decision making. Two people at a whiteboard generate more ideas faster and conclude in agreement quicker than any other set-up we’ve ever seen. We believe things are faster face to face. We optimize for face to face collaboration Every individual should know at the start of the day what their goals are for that day, how they relate to the team’s weekly goal, and to what is being released. Teams have weekly goals, broken down into daily and subdaily goals. We believe Intercom has an incredible opportunity, but we are in a race against time. When we think about building, we think about daily and weekly goals Everyone should push everyone else to reduce scope and simplify, in order to move faster and not spend time on things that turn out not to be important. All our projects are scoped into small independent releases that add value to customers. Therefore we always optimize for shipping the fastest, smallest, simplest thing that will get us closer to our objective and help us learn what works. We believe you achieve greatness in 1,000 small steps. To that end, we have a set of guidelines: Many small steps are better than bigger launches In order to grow and scale our product teams, people need a set of values to help them make good decisions that align with what we believe. We have a set of guidelines for making decisions Nonetheless, we hope that by sharing how we work, we will help others reflect on how they build, and ultimately help them improve. And whilst this works for our current team size (four Product Managers, four Designers, 25 Engineers), it’s not how we worked when we had a much smaller team, and it may not work when we have doubled our team. This process is generally working for us today.By the time you read this, we will have tweaked something. ![]() Your culture is different, so what you do should be different. This process is not right for every company.A lightweight, transparent, comprehensive roadmap.A set of guidelines for making decisions.Our process is broken down into four main areas: In the last 12-18 months, over dozens of releases from incremental improvements to huge redesigns, we’ve learned a lot about scaling a product building team, and the nitty gritty involved in getting valuable product out the door as fast as possible. Given the abundance of abstracted advice, primarily from advisors rather than operators, and lack of actual examples happening from fast growing startups, we thought it would be valuable to share more about how we work at Intercom. Maybe that’s because it’s a messy reality and people can be uncomfortable sharing that in public. There’s been lots written about how Internet businesses should build software, from books like The Lean Start-Up, and posts from Google Ventures, but not many examples where startups open up their process and show how their product teams make it really happen.īack in 2013, Spotify talked about how they build, but other detailed examples are hard to find. ![]()
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