One of the reasons that I read books is the privilege to learn from the experience and knowledge of others, especially those I cannot meet. I consider the books written by founders and CEOs a rather unique genre as they adopt a first person perspective of being at the wheel, making the narrative thrilling. Few such titles include The Elephant Catchers (MindTree), The Hard Thing about Hard Things (Loud Cloud), Only the Paranoid Survive (Intel), and a few more.
However, unlike other books that adopt the storyline format while simultaneously highlighting the learnings alongside the narrative, this book is a compilation of learnings and best practices that helped Basecamp attain phenomenal growth while staying true to its purpose while employing a small dispersed team. For perspective; the conventional model employs hundreds of engineers, under one roof, writing thousands of lines of codes to develop a product that sells to few thousands subscribers to rake in a couple of million dollars.
Whereas, Basecamp achieves the same feat with a handful of employees dispersed across global timezone. So, if I had to summarise it one sentence:
Achieving growth the Basecamp way, narrated using Product Management principles
As we all know that scale builds momentum, introducing a myriad of challenges that lead to complex organisations with bureaucratic decision making that kill agility. It is not only difficult to circumvent these challenges but also resist the temptation to adopt these toxic features for the sake of being called an enterprise rather than a start-up or mom-pop shop. Basecamp founders also made such calls; the learnings narrate the rationale and implications of such calls.
The learnings are bucketed under the various avenues of business including initiation, progress, productivity, evolution, promotion, hiring, culture, and few others. And just as their product, the narratives have been kept simple, staying true to the principles of Keep It Simple Stupid or the Kano model used to prioritise product features and finally delivering the basics.
Although there are numerous finer matters in business, the book addresses the ones that drive the most significant impact – perhaps an outcome of the Pareto chart. And just as Project and Product Management principles acknowledge, you will neither have time to execute every task nor possess the bandwidth to deliver every feature. Furthermore, this resonates with product management decisions that trade-off comprehensiveness against core to maintain simplicity and usability.
As far as the audience is concerned, you do NOT have to be founder for the book to be of your relevance. The learnings are agnostic to your employment status as a startup founder or manager, as most of them will help you become more effective at work. And even if your are not in a position to drive revolutionary change in your organisation, finer changes in your attitude and your team’s approach is certainly worthwhile. And if you’re trying to juggle between work and your passion project or side-gig as a founder, this book is a must read.
If you’re experiencing a reading block and looking for an easy read, this is the ONE! The book is divided into buckets of avenues with multiple learning topics – not exceeding two-three pages and flaunting its own separator page with doodle graphics. You can easily finish this on a to-and-fro domestic flight but certainly insufficient to keep you hooked on a long haul.
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Feature Image Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
Savvy Munshi 