Managing chaos, feature bloat, and other listener questions

Welcome to Rework, podcast by thirty seven signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the thirty seven signals team with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansen, our company cofounders. This week, we're gonna knock out a couple of more video submissions that we got to the Rework podcast. So let's start with one from Jacob. Hello, Jason, David, and Kimberly. My question is about managing order and chaos. How do you create structure at a workplace without creating a bureaucracy? How do you maintain free flow without everything becoming a mess? What have been your strategies for walking this tightrope, and how do you personally discern when you're leaning too much one way or the other? Thank you. There's probably a lot of ways to answer this. One way I would start with is just like compartmentalization. People are assigned to a project for, let's say, a few weeks, whatever it might be, and, like, that's, like, all they have to worry about. So this idea that, like, there's so much going on and there's so many things happening, like, I don't know where the chaos is coming from, but if you're focused on just one thing, on one project, and that's your responsibility and that's kind of the only responsibility you have, I feel like that's kind of enough usually to keep all that noise away. I think if you're constantly bouncing around, if you're constantly involved with five or six separate things across the company in different places, it is gonna feel like chaos. It is gonna be hard. There's always stuff bubbling up to do. So I think what we try to do is we try to draw some borders around people, give them a project, whatever it might be, give them a a time frame essentially to get it done within, and then that's their only responsibility. I think that's maybe the best way on an individual level I I can think of. At a company level, if you're changing your direction constantly, if you're changing your mind all the time on big picture things, that's gonna drip down and affect everybody else. It's gonna feel like there's chaos everywhere. It's like this. Partially, it's just about, like, committing to something and and doing the thing and seeing it through versus constantly, like, never quite finishing, getting 80, 90% done, then moving on to something else. That can create a lot of chaos and a lot of loose ends and untied knots that just people start to trip over eventually. I don't know really where to go with that, but that's kind of a couple of things that come to mind. And I think the way we've tried to do that in a structured way is by following ShapeUp. ShapeUp is our software methodology that speaks exactly to this problem of thrashing because I actually think that's the default state when especially founders are close to the product …