Software as art

What It Covers

37signals cofounders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson explain how they build opinionated software with strong perspectives, refuse popular feature requests like Gantt charts, and develop product vision through execution rather than upfront planning.

Key Questions Answered

• •Refusing Customer Requests: Basecamp rejected Gantt chart requests for 20 years despite thousands of customer demands because their core premise defines project management as primarily communication, not charts and graphs, demonstrating commitment to product vision over feature accumulation.
• •Taste Development Process: Product principles emerge from execution, not planning. Build first based on gut instinct and accumulated taste, then extract and articulate the underlying principles afterward. The implicit feeling precedes explicit documentation, making retrospective analysis more honest than forward planning.
• •Fisher Price Easy Standard: 37signals uses this specific mental model to test whether features meet their clarity goals. Having concrete phrasings like this provides a measurable benchmark to evaluate whether current work aligns with intended product perspective and user experience aspirations.
• •Blue Ocean Strategy Framework: Companies succeed by making deliberate trade-offs, not excelling at everything. Google demonstrates massive profitability while scoring zero on customer service, proving organizations must choose which parameters to optimize and which to sacrifice when defining their competitive position.