The Culture of 37signals

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About

This document is about how the company 37signals is managed.

First of all, via their homepage:

37signals is a private software company best known for making Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE; writing business and software books (Getting Real, REWORK, REMOTE, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and Shape Up); and inventing the Ruby on Rails framework.

Grabbing my attention

I started reading their website and was immediately pulled in. It paints a picture of a so-called “calm” company that rejects hustle culture. It does this without diluting the job-to-be done — create excellent software.

To do this, the company has clearly given tremendous thought to what conditions are required to repeatedly achieving this goal from which all growth, opportunity, profit follow. Many of its principle will be familiar to those who study Amazon’s customer-centric focus but because 37signals is a small, private, remote-first company (which has been succeeding for over 20 years itself) many of its practices might be feel more relatable and approachable.

They strike me as the kind of place that appreciates all the new-age lip-service towards being a company that serves all of its stakeholders but has found a path to doing that by being unapologetically profit-focused by doing one simple thing — delivering beautiful products to serve their customers. And to do that, in the most undistracted manner possible, they select for employees who are aligned with a culture of both craft and calm.

Caveats, disclosure, and personal angle That said, I don’t know anyone who works there. There’s no way I can know if their way of working is the source of their success. I also listen to and love the Founder’s podcast which can feel like a hagiography of maniacs (like the robber barons or Michael Jordan). I’m not pretending 37signals has found The Way to run a company. But they seem to have a found A way and that way is unconventional, contrarian, refreshing, and most of all resonant.

I started my career at SIG. As a young fish in the bowl, I couldn’t appreciate the culture they cultivated. I had no reference points and also didn’t even think about organized behavior as a matter to even consider. In hindsight I understand how intentional the culture was. How their training and pedagogy was deeply researched and deployed.

Of course there was brainwashing…

many would use the term Kool-Aid but I don’t

If you understand the history of the Jonestown massacre you’ll find that drinking the suicide cocktail was anything but voluntary. The slaughter of children to destroy parents’ hope is so evil that it’s hard not to find the Kool-Aid reference to cults offensive.

…every powerful team’s cohesion is rooted in a shared identity that flows from some mix of internal propaganda to norms of what is honorable and what is weak. As the saying goes, the poison is in the dose. So why did I write this guide? I simply found what I read inspirational. I like how the founders think. I like the beauty-through-simplicity of their design, their books (I’m reading Rework), and website copy (goated copywriting…it’s a delight to read the original sources both in form and substance).

But there’s a personal reason too.

When I started reading their stuff it reminded me so much of my friend and cofounder on moontower.ai, Emi Gal.

Emi is an extremely bright, energetic, optimistic, positive and successful entrepreneur (he built a software company in college that he exited a decade later before founding Ezra where he currently serves as CEO). As we build moontower.ai, I saw so much of the 37signals influence in him.

We’ve discussed it and indeed he’s a huge fan of them. He’s read all their books (and recommended Rework and Shape Up to me) but we also talked about how he came to many of the same conclusions while running his first company. I think that’s why reading the 37signals philosophy conjured Emi so strongly — the focused, can-do, undistracted spirit wrapped in a deep care for a holistic well-being which enables you to be excellent, rather than being at odds with professional commitment & performance.

A great hire isn’t someone decorated with credentials. That’s not a knock on credentials so much as a redirection to what matters — people who solves problems autonomously or as Emi puts it, can read a Jira (or in our case Notion) ticket and get to the finish line without needing a meeting for every clarification. Being able to do a task but understand the wider solution the task serves and course-correcting in space. In other words, thinking like a founder. The 37signals people call it a “manager of one” (described below). You can have the type of culture 37signals advocates if you select for it. And that means finding evidence for the traits you are looking for not proxy prestige accomplishments.

In the movie Boiler Room, the senior brokers warn the trainees “no writing wood”. Writing wood is the act of making lots of phone calls to pad your stats to claim you did your job but the leads generated are useless because the junior broker was anxious to get off the phone instead of aggressively selling. There are lots of impressive sounding people with sterling resumes whose entire body of work is just a pile of wood. Often these smokescreen sophists will come out of prestigious place with a business so fantastic it has enough fat for useless employees to hide inside.

(It’s tempting to give credit to the cultures of highly profitable companies but if you’re a near-monopoly I’d guess it’s just as likely that a fantastic business masks a trash culture — the business might rock despite its culture. Not because of it.)

The principles laid out below strongly suggest that it’s possible to have a deeply accountable, bs-free, low politic, transparent, rewarding & remunerative culture all while preserving the balance to be excellent at work without work being your master.

If the principles sounded soft I’d accuse them of being idealistic. Instead, I see an honest approach to tradeoffs — it’s demanding in ways that lead to right answers not performative ones. More right answers = less waste.*

What to expect

I simply extracted the points I wanted to memorialize and keep as a guide although the links to the original sources are embedded. This document should serve as a convenient pointer to a bunch of 37signals writing re-factored to be linear and distilled.

I included my own comments where I felt the urge.

As you read it, it’s useful to think of how the ideas might apply or completely backfire where you work. This will either reveal an exception with their methods, or diagnose a problem with yours. Perhaps you even noticed a problem with your own organization but seeing how its handled here sparks a lightbulb moment.

*This is major cost of all the proxy measures and signaling that strangle school, work, healthcare but that’s way beyond the scope of this. I just appreciate the little crusades, like a specific company culture, that aspire to real flourishing not just its patina

Manifesto

Work isn’t war

Corporate language is filled with metaphors of war. Companies “conquer” the market, they “capture” mindshare, they “target” customers, they employ a sales “force”, they hire “head-hunters”, they “destroy” the competition, they pick their “battles”, and make a “killing”. That’s an awful paradigm and we want nothing to do with it. Work isn’t war. We come in peace.

Profit motive

The tech industry is especially good at losing money. Growth is electric, but profits are elusive. We take an old school, economics 101 approach: Make more than you spend. That’s why we’ve been profitable every year we’ve been in business. It’s the responsible way to be reliable and take care of customers over the long haul.

Shape Up every six weeks

Shape Up is a methodology we invented to help software teams design, develop, and ship excellent software every six weeks without burning out. Why six? It’s long enough to make meaningful progress, but short enough that you can see the end from the beginning. Plus it gives you about eight chances a year to recalibrate and decide what to work on next. Here’s our free book on it.

8/8/8

8 hours for work, 8 hours for life, 8 hours of sleep. That’s a fair formula. It’s not work/life balance — it’s work/life/sleep balance. A lack of sleep isn’t a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity — literally.

Bury the hustle

Hustle mania, hustle porn, the grind, call it what you will. We call it insidious. There’s nothing glamorous about being totally rundown after weeks, months, or years of non-stop whatever-it-takes work. And pumping your mind full of anxiety about whether you’re getting enough, doing enough, or chasing enough is no way to live. Put in a good day’s work, close the damn laptop, and get on with life.

NOTASAP

The expectation of immediate response is everywhere. Real-time everything isn’t human-scale, yet that’s how so many work and communicate these days. Not us. We think urgency is overrated, and ASAP is poison. Real-time is the wrong time most of the time.

Don’t emulate the office

Work remotely, not locally apart. Don’t just have the same meetings on Zoom, have fewer meetings. Rather than discussing everything in real-time, communicate asynchronously instead. Rather than feel the need to know where everyone is, let go and trust more. Don’t try to emulate the office and everything it stands for — stand against it. We even wrote a book about it.

Hours aren’t equal

An hour isn’t an hour. It’s a collection of minutes that add up to an hour. And 60 uninterrupted minutes is a higher-quality hour than an hour chopped into four 15-minute sessions. Uninterrupted hours lead to quality time, quality work. Days chunked into tiny blocks of time are a terrible way to work. [Kris: Also see Paul Graham’s Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule]

On repeat

If you’re talking about something new or novel, you’ll have to repeat yourself for years before you’re heard.

Meetings aren’t free

Meetings are the last resort, not the first option. Five people in a room for an hour isn’t a one hour meeting, it’s a five hour meeting. How often was it worth that? Could you have just written it up instead? Be mindful of the costs and tradeoffs.

Small tech

Big tech takes. Big tech snoops. Big tech targets. Big tech gouges. Big tech muscles. Big tech tramples. Big tech homogenizes. We’re for small tech.

Know no

“No” is no to one thing. “Yes” is no to a lot of things.

Disagree and commit

Consensus is cozy, but broad agreement is not our aim. The right decision is. Which is why we take the time to think, debate, persuade, listen and reconsider and then, someone, decides. If you disagree, that’s fine, but once the decision is made, it’s time to commit and support it completely.

JOMO not FOMO

Have you seen? Have you heard? What’s your take on? Can you believe? OMG that tweet. Read that story yet? Seen that video? Finish the second season yet? So much FOMO. We’d rather celebrate JOMO — the Joy of Missing Out. Life’s better when you’re missing the stuff that doesn’t matter anyway.

[Kris: Couldn’t agree more. I can be so indifferent to what the news talks about you could call me a bad citizen. Cast your stones. I’ll make it up my way. You might wanna read this little book to hear someone much smarter than me explain it.]

Miscommunication problems

Companies don’t have communication problems, they have miscommunication problems. The smaller the company, group, or team, the fewer opportunities for miscommunication. As Osmo Wiio said, “If communication can fail, it will. If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.”

Easy?

Easy is a word people use to describe other people’s jobs. Be careful not to assume the things you don’t know, or don’t routinely do, are easy. Would it be fair to call what you do “easy”?

Planning is guessing

Plans are guesses. The longer-term the plan, the worse the guess. Replace years with weeks. 3 year plan? Make it a 3 week plan. 10 year plan? 10 week plan. Plan more often, not less often. The nearer-term your plans, the more accurate they’ll be.

Sleep on it

The end of the day has a way of convincing you what you’ve done is good, but the next morning has a way of telling you the truth. Even if you’re sure, sleep on it.

Companies aren’t families

When companies say they’re a family, it’s a veiled way of demanding total sacrifice. Nights, weekends, whatever it takes for, you know, “the family”. But great companies aren’t fake families — they’re allies of real families. They don’t eat into people’s personal time, they don’t ask people to dial-in during vacations, and they don’t push them to work Sundays to prep for the meeting on Monday.

What’s in a name? (fun one)

Mankind constantly analyzes radio waves from outer space in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Since this analysis started, almost all of the signal sources have been identified. 37 signals, however, remain unexplained.

Working at 37Signals

Overview

Rock star? Pass. Friendly and thoughtful? Let’s talk.

In broad strokes, Managers of One thrive at 37signals. If you consider yourself an eager learner, a conscientious worker, and a thoughtful, kind, supportive human, you might just have a home here.

We don’t place independent value on where you come from, where you live, where you worked before, where you went to school, if you graduated or dropped out, or how well you did or didn’t do. We care about who you are today, how you’ll be tomorrow, and what you’re able to do now.

What it’s like to work here

A calm, low-distraction environment where you can do your best work.

We work hard to make sure every employee is given the freedom, tools, trust, and support to do the best work of their careers. That’s why so many people who work at 37signals stay at 37signals.

We value a calm company and deliberate, concerted effort. You’ll have fewer meetings, hardly any email, and far fewer interruptions than you’re used to. 8-hour days and 40-hour weeks are plenty of time to do great work, so that’s all we expect. [summer hours are 32 hours per week]

It’ll take some getting used to if you’ve been immersed in ASAP culture, but after a while you’ll wonder how you worked any other way.

We work in small, independent teams, typically on a 6 week cycle.

Everyone at 37signals participates in Everyone On Support every few months, and twice a year the entire company gathers in person.

Read our employee handbook for more details on what it’s like to work at 37signals.

Make sure you check out the benefits and perks. Spoiler; they’re great.

We respect everyone’s right to participate in political expression and activism, but we avoid having political debates on our internal communication systems. 37signals as a company also does not weigh in on politics publicly, outside of topics directly related to our business. You should be at peace with both of these stances.

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How We Work

Remotely

37signals is a fully distributed company. Our team works from all over the world, across 5 continents. We don’t care where employees choose to live and work, just that they’re here to do great work on exceptional products, alongside a world-class team. We’ve been remote since we started, and our founders literally wrote the book on the subject.

You can work from anywhere, but please be sure to inform your People Ops team when you move – especially across state or country borders. It may affect your or the company’s tax situation.

Cycles

We work in 6-week cycles at 37signals. This fixed cadence serves to give us an internal sense of urgency, to keep projects from ballooning, and to provide us with a regular interval to make decisions about what we’re working on.

Our cycle structure is particularly important for the product teams, since they approach feature and product development with scope and budget in mind up front. For more on this, all employees are encouraged to read Shape Up.

All teams operate on the same 6-week cadence.

Cooldown

In between each cycle, we spend two weeks cooling down. That’s when product teams deal with bugs, when everyone writes up what they’ve worked on, and when teams decide what to tackle next. Sometimes big batch projects extend into cool down, but we try to avoid that.

Communication

Since we work asynchronously and remotely, it’s important to radiate information about what we’re working on. We have 4 chief mechanisms for doing that.

What did you work on today? You’ll be asked this question every afternoon, and you’re required to answer at least twice a week. You should describe what you’re working on and give some context about why you’re working on it or why it’s important.

What will you be working on this week? You’ll be asked this question every Monday morning, and you’re required to answer every week.

Daily and weekly check-ins are subdivided by department so you’re only subscribed to your team’s answers. You’re of course free to subscribe to other team check-ins, but you’re not obligated to do so if you find it too noisy.

Every team submits a Kickoff for the upcoming cycle, and they’re due the second Friday of the cooldown period. Teams use their kickoff to summarize the work they have scheduled for the upcoming cycle.

Heartbeats are required of every team, and they’re due on the first Friday of the cooldown period. Teams use their heartbeat to summarize and celebrate the work they completed during the previous cycle, and the work described in the cycle heartbeat should line up (more or less) with the work you scheduled in the cycle kickoff.

These 4 mechanisms work together to free individuals and teams to run their days and cycles with confidence and independence. We have six opportunities per year to make big decisions about what to work on, and the rest of the time should chiefly be spent carrying out those short-term plans. By having clear expectations for communication, it’s easier for everyone to build trust in where we’re going and why.

Heartbeats and Kickoffs are assigned to team leads well in advance of every cycle. Heartbeats, kickoffs, and automatic check-in answers can all be found in the What Works project for the current year.

Asynchronously

Most of the work you do at 37signals shouldn’t require you to be in constant communication throughout the entire day with someone.

You should collaborate as though most things you ask of others will get an answer eventually, but not necessarily right this second. Your first choice of action should be to post a message, a todo, or a document about what you need to explain or need to know. Then others can read it on their schedule, when the natural lulls of the day allow it, rather than being interrupted right in their peak flow time.

Of course there will be times when you do need to tightly collaborate with someone in real time, but those cases should be infrequent. We have pings, video calls, screen-sharing, or even in-person collaboration for when async isn’t efficient.

Balanced

We limit ourselves to a 40-hour (32-hour in the summer) work week. Keeping our hours at work limited forces us to prioritize the work that really matters. A healthy amount of sleep and a rich and rewarding life outside of work should not be squandered for a few more hours at work.

There are occasions when teams or individuals need to work off-hours for on-call, maintenance, or emergencies. This time should not be in addition to your normal working hours. Use your discretion to take time off to make up for the additional hours you put in during the week.

With managers of one

We rely on everyone at 37signals to do a lot of self-management. People who do this well are managers of one, and we expect everyone to embody this principle.

That means setting your own direction when one isn’t given; and determining what needs to be done, and doing it, without waiting for someone to tell you to. A manager of one will spend their time well when left to their own devices. There’s always more work to be done, always more initiatives to kick off, and always more improvement to be had.

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Hire managers of one

When you’re hiring, seek out people who are managers of one.

What’s that mean? A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves.

These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction. When you leave them alone, they surprise you with how much they’ve gotten done. They don’t need a lot of handholding or supervision.

How can you spot these people? Look at their history. Have they been self-sufficient at previous jobs? Have they defined their own role before? Have they started their own site/company before? Or done their own thing in some other way? Find someone with initiative and a budding entrepreneurial spirit. And then nurture it.

You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. When you find these people, it frees up the rest of your team to work more and manage less.

The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication

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Intro The how, where, why, and when we communicate. Long form asynchronous? Real-time chat? In-person? Video? Verbal? Written? Via email? In Basecamp? How do we keep everyone in the loop without everyone getting tangled in everyone else’s business? It’s all in here.

Kris’ hand-picked rules of thumb that stood out

General

Meetings are the last resort, not the first option…Five people in a room for an hour isn’t a one hour meeting, it’s a five hour meeting. Be mindful of the tradeoffs.

Poor communication creates more work. Companies don’t have communication problems, they have miscommunication problems. The smaller the company, group, or team, the fewer opportunities for miscommunication.

Cadence

Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time.

Give meaningful discussions a meaningful amount of time to develop and unfold. Rushing to judgement, or demanding immediate responses, only serves to increase the odds of poor decision making.

Urgency is overrated, ASAP is poison.

Ask yourself if others will feel compelled to rush their response if you rush your approach.

Write at the right time. Sharing something at 5pm may keep someone at work longer. You may have some spare time on a Sunday afternoon to write something, but putting it out there on Sunday may pull people back into work on the weekends. Early Monday morning communication may be buried by other things. There may not be a perfect time, but there’s certainly a wrong time. Keep that in mind when you hit send.

Consider where you put things. The right communication in the wrong place might as well not exist at all. When someone relies on search to find something it’s often because it wasn’t where they expected something to be.

Communication often interrupts, so good communication is often about saying the right thing at the right time in the right way with the fewest side effects.

The end of the day has a way of convincing you what you’ve done is good, but the next morning has a way of telling you the truth. If you aren’t sure, sleep on it before saying it.

The importance of writing

Internal communication based on long-form writing, rather than a verbal tradition of meetings, speaking, and chatting, leads to a welcomed reduction in meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities to interrupt and be interrupted.

Writing solidifies, chat dissolves. Substantial decisions start and end with an exchange of complete thoughts, not one-line-at-a-time jousts. If it’s important, critical, or fundamental, write it up, don’t chat it down.

Speaking only helps who’s in the room, writing helps everyone. This includes people who couldn’t make it, or future employees who join years from now.

How they apply these principles day-to-day

98% of our internal communication happens inside Basecamp. That means all company-wide discussions, social chatter, project-related work, sharing of ideas, internal debates, automatic check-ins., status updates, policy updates, and all official decisions and announcements all happen in Basecamp. A single centralized tool keeps everything together and creates a single source of truth for everyone across the company.

We don’t use email internally (we do externally),
We don’t use separate chat tools like Slack or Teams
We rarely have in-person meetings.

Every workday at 16:30, Basecamp (the product) automatically asks every employee “What did you work on today?” Whatever people write up is shared with everyone in the company. Everyone’s responses are displayed on a single page, grouped by date, so anyone who’s curious about what’s happening across the company can simply read from top to bottom. Some people just jot down a few bullets. Others write multi-paragraph stories to share — and document — the thinking behind their work. There are no requirements here. We just ask everyone to write in their own style.

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This routine is about loose accountability and strong reflection. Writing up what you did every day is a great way to think back about what you accomplished and how you spent your time.

Social cohesion Every few weeks, or once a month, Basecamp will automatically ask everyone a social-style question. “What books are you reading?” Or “Try anything new lately?” Or “Anything inspire you lately?” Or “Seen any great design recently?” Or “What did you do this weekend?” These entirely optional questions are meant to shake loose some stuff that you’d love to share with everyone else, but you hadn’t had an opportunity to do so. This kind of internal communication helps grease the social gears. This is especially useful for remote teams, like ours. When we know each other a little better, we work a little better together.

“Heartbeats” —> 6 week reflections Heartbeats summarize the last ~6-weeks of work for a given team, department, or individual (if that person is a department of one). They’re written by the lead of the group, and they’re meant for everyone in the company to read. They summarize the big picture accomplishments, they detail the little things that mattered, and they generally highlight the importance of the work. They’ll also shine a light on challenges and difficulties along the way. They’re a good reminder that it’s not all sunshine all the time. On balance, Heartbeats are wonderful to write, fun to read, and they help everyone — including those not directly involved with the work — reflect on jobs well done and progress well made.

“Kickoffs” —> Project the next 6 weeks Kickoffs are essentially the opposites of Heartbeats. Rather than reflect, they project. They’re all about what the team plans on taking on over the next 6 weeks. Projects, initiatives, revamps, whatever it might be, if it’s on the slate, it gets summarized in the Kickoff. While Kickoffs detail specific work for a specific group, they’re also meant for full-company consumption. Like Heartbeats, they’re written by the team lead. Kickoffs are broad in scope, so they don’t cover all the details in the work ahead — the teams doing the work are the ones that wade into those weeds. We don’t want to overwhelm everyone with details that don’t matter. If anyone’s curious about something included in a Kickoff, they’re free to post a comment and ask a question.

Day to day tactics in context

Effective communication requires context. Saying the right thing in the wrong place, or without proper detail, leads to double work and messages being missed. That’s why we spin up a separate Basecamp project for every project we work on. Everything related to that project is communicated inside that project. All the tasks, all the discussions, all the documents, all the debates, and all the decisions happen inside those walls. Everyone who needs access, has access. Every Basecamp project is a capsule of everything someone needs to know about that work project.

Further, we take spatial context seriously. If we’re discussing a specific task, we discuss it in the comment section below the task itself. If we’re talking about a specific document, we discuss it in the comments attached to the document. Communications stay attached to the thing we’re discussing. This provides the full story in one reliable place. The alternative is terrible — communication detached from the original source material, discussions all over the place, fragmented conversations missing entire chunks of time and detail, etc. Basecamp’s “everything is commentable” feature is what makes this possible for us.