Jason Fried of 37 Signals Shares His Knowledge at Web 2.0 Expo NYC

Jason Fried of 37 Signals presented a great talk at the Web 2.0 Expo today entitled “10 Things We’ve Learned at 37 Signals”.  Inspiring stuff if you’re a small company, but a lot of it probably is not applicable to medium-larger size organizations, especially the notion of “work less”. Although, I dig the enthusiasm and can appreciate this concept.

Here’s the rundown:

Momentum – “break big projects into smaller projects that can be completed in ~2 weeks”

Planning is overrated – “we don’t do roadmaps”

Decisions are temporary – “optimize for now, don’t plan for what might happen”

Red flag words - “need, can’t, easy, everyone, nobody”

Interruption is the enemy of productivity – “we [colleagues] don’t see each other”

Focus on what doesn’t change – “what matters today and 10 years from now”

Worrying about things that don’t matter yet – “the longer it takes to develop something the less likely you’ll launch it”

Underdo – “target non-consumers”

Find the right size -  “grow slowly, don’t take big jumps or be in a hurry”

Follow the chefs – “sharing (knowledge) is the best way to grow an audience”

Always be questioning – “why are we doing this? what problem are we solving? is this actually useful? etc.”

Give up on hard problems – “there is an abundance of easy problems to solve”

Work less – “we don’t work on fridays”
* Apparently the folks at 37 Signals enjoy a 32 hour week. We can all learn something here =)

I must have lost count somewhere because this looks like 13.  Oh well. Great stuff Jason!