Designing Collaboration in Workplace
When I was back in college, the world of startups fascinated me. My eventual foray into it was through the writings of few folks. One among them happens to be the founder of Basecamp software, Jason Fried. I read their books on running companies, culture setting ( Rework ) and product development(Shape-up). Their ideas left an impression on the young enthused kid looking at the world of startups infront of me.
Basecamp's work revolved around collaborating and ways to navigate being a knowledge worker. It was never relevant to me when I started my work career because the jobs I did were in sectors like logistics. The people I worked with were operationally savvy but not early adopters of digital products you witness in tech or startup companies.
But when I started working on Pipehaul and Subjimandi.app. I decided to not miss the opportunity to use Basecamp. This post is all about my struggle of figuring out that it was never about the product alone that made Basecamp work for its users but rather the processes that they built by using Basecamp.
The credit to instilling this thought goes to Sajit Pai of Blume Ventures who was talking about the importance of process and workflows over product in a recent podcast episode. It was the right framing that led me to write about the set of workflows we built for a small team of 12 folks. We were cross disciplinary, distributed and our work was interdependent.
Environment
We had an operations team of Produce Leads who were located either in production regions or consumption regions. Each worked in their varied time and worked with different set of stakeholders. They didn't have fixed hours but a critical function of their work was collaborating with the other side. This was to ensure the commodity procured and the commodity sold matched each other.
Next, we had a product team comprising of developers, designers and yours truly acting as PM working at individualistic times. We had young mothers, daughter's taking care of thier parents, sons building a house for their family and boys starting their first job. Not one of us were co-located. We worked on scoping, developing and shipping 3 different products in our time together.
The Pipehaul team lead by Anvesh, our senior leader collaborated with us wile performing the critical task of connecting our production and consumption region through transoprtation and distribution logistics to reach our buyers daily.
Setting up the company
If you keep the complaince part aside, a company starts when you have more than one person working on it. You can see my "Home" screen. This was one place of truth that captured all decisions , discussions and dictats relating to the company's work.
Primarily all company related policies, new team mate joining announcement and policy discussions were captured in PipehaulHQ section(top to the left).
The Avataars were created when a new team mate joined with the help of Pablo Stanley's openpeeps library. It was originally inspired by Basecamp Company sharing their illustrations instead of their faces in all their product demos. The alternate was seeing their initials of the name.
In Basecamp product the tools at disposal are categorised in to "Campfire" which resembles a group chat where all the members of the space can chat. Then there are purposeful discussions as "Messages" that would start with an long post seeking advice , feedback or explaination.
Next comes the "Tasks"where you could assign to-dos and have discussions about it in the same thread. The "Documentation" section where you could store stuff and a shared "Calendar" where you could see all the tasks deadlines and meetings. Lastly, the one feature that helped me the most is the "automatic checkin" where you set specific questions that would get triggered at the set times. This helped us immensely as no one had to do standups. Each member prioritised their work as they see best but everyone stays updated.
This sounds like productivity utopia, heck no. It took us deliberate practice and nudging to get all of them on-board and start using the product to its potential. This was a gradual process and I changed multiple things on the way to get a working model for our collaborations.
Examples of Workflows
You could create a template if the "teams" and "projects" were recurring modes. So, I did templatised three of the most used ones.
Our team template comprises of assignments that we to work towards for our team's work. In product team, discussions thread comprised of each of us proposing a change in our way of working or how we shuold adopt new practicises. This was helpful because it led us to start working in cycles (2-4 weeks) and the process of scoping was hashed out in the discussion stream.
Then the projects template were setup for each cycle we ran where the end outcome resulted in us shipping the project out in the world. Though we had a dedicated space for collaborating, it took us good 6 cycles to get into the groove of scoping better. The entire process of learning to scope can be read in this book written by one of employees of Basecamp, Ryan Singer.
Distributed HQs
The other project template was "Location" template. We were a distributed organisation operating in 5 different locations and each required its own space because of the work that is happening in that location and collaborating required to execute. So, every Subjimandi operating region comprised of a space where the people working shared their work. It included the accounting, analysis and discussion pertaining to that region.
The segmentation of Group and Operation chats was to ensure the daily work doesn't get too dense to crowd out other types of messages that team was sharing.
The 1 on 1 s you see in the template snapshot was a dedicated space with every direct reportee where we shared and scheduled our discussions. It was not a very active but it was useful when we were planning to set the agenda for next meeting. It eventually became a journal of progress the individuals made since starting work with us.
I am a heavy consumer of content across streams and in many ways learned the ropes by reading others experience about work. Training team mates always was an area of interest. I spent way too much of my time in training the team in the process, concept and conditions pertaining to the overall market at Pipehaul and Subjimandi.app. So, a dedicated space where I shared all my learnings, typed up notes and library of resources for teammates to read.
Learnings
In the new role, I am tasked with setting up a team again in a similar manner where the work is accomplished with a distrbuted workforce.
The experience of running an "asynchronous" setup at Pipehaul has made me more aware of the challenges of implementing it again. With Basecamp as a product , we changed the way we worked. We had no meetings but when met, it was to solve problems. There were no brainstorming session but rather workshops to share your learning quarterly. There was no decisions taken on call, they were communicated through written format.
What Basecamp cultivated and the team behind it preached is counter intuitive to how most workplaces operate. They focus on being deliberate, thoughful and precise. The onus of figuring out one’s intent, work and effort was not left to the person being communicated instead becomes the responsibility of the person conveying.
This type of working is only possible if the the team working as a company and its overall business are self assured about one's limitations and future prospects. It also stems from a culture of trust by default and treating each and every member of team as responsbile people looking to contribute for the betterment of the company.
But the current place I work is a typical work environment where to make a decision you need to do collaborative brainstorming and attend daily standups where you recite the work you will be targeting for the day. It is operating successfully and growing tremendously. So, adapting the prior learnings to my current environment while designing the next set of processes.
Signing off ,
Vivek, drafting processes for the time being.