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Ryan Singer

I'm Ryan, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp and author of Shape Up. Ask me anything!

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Basecamp
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Hi Makers! I've worked on all levels of the software stack, from UI design to back-end programming to strategy. I've spent over 16 years at Basecamp and designed features used by millions and invented processes our teams use to design, develop and ship the right things. These days I'm focused on strategy: understanding what our customers are trying to do and how to make the product fit them better. My new book is called "Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters" it's all about how product development happens at Basecamp. I also talk about it in this week's episode of Product Hunt radio. I will be logging in to answer questions on Friday 20 September at 10:00am MT.
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Sandhya Ramachandran
Hi Ryan, what was the defining point of your career when you began to truly start believing in your abilities? What lead up to it?
Ryan Singer
@thedreamydryad I still have all kinds of doubts. They just don’t matter. It’s more fun to do things because you enjoy them and find them interesting and look for some way that they can be of use to other people.
Andrew Cianci
👋Hi Ryan, the more we talk about separated IC and Management tracks at the office, the more i begin to wonder what path i should be heading in. I am an IC at heart, and in a perfect world, i would be sharpening my skills, mentoring junior designers and still having a strong influence in the product. But i also have a desire to build out the design team, juggle the creative demands and resources of the rest of the company and have a more strategic role in the direction of the product. Is there a happy medium between the roles? Is there a way to still be creative with boots on the ground AND have a higher-level impact on design efficiency and organization without being a people-pusher?
Ryan Singer
@thechanch At Basecamp we dissolve this separation between independent contributor and manager with what we call “moonlight managers.” All managers have to do Real Work — make something. Then some percentage of their time is spent on managing other people, not all their time. This keeps everybody on the ground and connected with the realities of the work.
Felix Josemon
How do you prioritise on what's to do next? What are your ideal day to day looks like now? Do you have a cheat sheet that you follow when it comes to product strategic decisions? Unrelated question but hey it's AMA;) Ever been to India? Thoughts about products build from India? Will definitely be reading the book:)
Kingshuk Mukherjee
Hi Ryan, big fan of Shape Up. What made you guys decide to share Shape Up as a site? Was that a decision to ship quickly, test in the wild and get feedback before creating physical versions? Or was there more to it?
Ryan Singer
@kingshuk_mukherjee1 Yes. Mostly it removed a lot of barriers to shipping. It didn’t have to be perfect, I didn’t have to find every typo, we didn’t need to figure out how to lay out the images in certain way for pages in a print book, etc. And we wanted it to be very shareable — something people could easily quote or refer other people to. I did get a lot of helpful feedback in the first few days—mostly about typos and things like that. Then as the emails and tweets came, I discovered what questions people had and what needed to be added. This is helping us get to a point where we are more confident about releasing the book in other formats that are less malleable, like Kindle or pint.
Kingshuk Mukherjee
@rjs Thanks Ryan. Great book and I appreciate how much effort when into documenting your processes. I'm learning a ton.
Jonathan Berkey
I have a totally bootstrapped side project of an iOS app that I want to get in the hands of users. I know in Rework you guys talked about gorilla marketing some. Ideas on how one could do this in such a competitive mobile app landscape? I have some ideas and sharing on social media seems to just get lost in the noise. Cheers!
Ryan Singer
@berkshop I don’t think there’s a formula. I would start on the ground in real life with people you know who need this thing and work out from there.
Vlad Korobov
Why there is no board view with columns in Basecamp?
Abadesi
Thanks everyone for posting questions - Ryan will be logging in to answer questions on Friday 20 September at 10:00am MT.
Ryan Singer
@abadesi Thanks for organizing. I enjoyed it.
Henning Witzel
Hey Ryan! In my company we currently have 10 cross-functional teams consisting each of 5-8 front and backend developers. The teams own a specific context of the platform and have ownership about everything they design, build and ship. That means they also have to deal with potential issues they cause on production (including a rotation of being an agent every two weeks and deal with on-duty issues of high severity). How do you deal with production issues at Basecamp? After a team has build something in the cycle and the gets re-grouped for something else, who has the ownership of the services / code that has been produced?
gentorify gentorify
I'd love to hear about how you avoid getting into slumps with projects at Basecamp
gentorify gentorify
heey
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