This entry is cross-posted with my personal blog at hellofunction.com (RSS feed), mainly because I figured this might be of interest to the readers of both.

I like slow weekends when I’m not under the gun with work. Matt Webb says this feels like “zero gravity”, and I have to agree. I typically take this time to catch up on my reading, so in case you’re interested, here’s what’s caught my eye in the past week.

1) This interview with Jeff Bezos on Smartmoney (about the future of Amazon.com) is interesting. I’ve always been a huge fan of Amazon and I do admire a company that manages to pull away from what most would call its core business (online sales) to fill a need of others - which is the case of their Web Services platform, that we‘ve been using for a few years now^[1] - or the Kindle, which follows Bezos’ vision that people will read again.

2) My copy of Adaptive Path’s Subject To Change has finally arrived and I can’t wait to go through it. I’ll post some more thoughts as soon as I finish reading it, but usually those guys don’t disappoint. It is safe to assume that if you’re into the business of building products, you’ll like (and get value out of) this book.

3) If you’re a fan of number crunching (we’re doing a few interesting things with map/reduce with a client of ours), you’ll probably be interested in a post about data mining over at New Scientist. It talks about what kinds of data companies are collecting based on your online habits. It also briefly mentions Stephen Baker’s new book The Numerati which I personally haven’t read yet (but will). If you fancy number crunching, though, you may want to look at Supercrunchers as well, that I personally loved.

4) For the rubyists out there, the Rubyconf 08 videos are now online, so you might want to start your downloads if you (like me) missed the conference. The guys over at Confreaks - who go through all the trouble of filming, encoding, uploading and serving these videos - deserve a few drinks.

^[1] For those curious, an interesting tidbit: Goplan was the first rails-based application to publicly run on EC2 instances (while EC2 was in beta, in September of 06). How cool is that?

I have been dedicating some of my time to catch up on reading and doing some writing of my own. I’ve started to publish a few of my thoughts on my recently opened personal blog, and hopefully some of you who’ve been subscribers to this one for long will enjoy the things I’ve been exploring.

Yesterday in particular I posted an article on peak potential (and how some people unfortunately never reach it) that I’d love you to read and discuss. It talks about how talent needs nurture from the individual himself and the environment or team around him.

If you like that one post, here’s the rest of the blog and the RSS feed so you can subscribe. I hope to have some of you as readers of that blog as well as this one. Thank you!

PS: naturally I’ll still be writing on this blog about both what we’re doing as a company and the topics we think and work on: design thinking, development and web-based product strategy. So stick around, obviously.

Growing a company is tough. I found (or we as a company did, I should say) that quite often things get lost in the shuffle of managing a business. And I don’t mean small things like remembering to blog or twitter often, or maybe to order coffee supplies every once in a while. I mean it’s easy to forget the crucial bits, things like why you started the company in the first place.

A few years ago when we started there weren’t that many companies like ourselves out there. These days, there’s quite a few. I feel it is important to share one very important thought we sometimes overlook: you should never forget where you came from, why you are where here, and where you want to go next.

Our solution, CEPs

When we first started (when there was only 4 of us) I thought it would be a good idea to keep an updated list of Concerns, Expectations and Priorities [1]. So we created that list in our private wiki (more on how we use our wiki in a future post). Every one of us went in and wrote down his concerns, expectations and priorities.

I feel like writing these things down was almost as important as writing down our core values for several reasons. One, it made us actually consciously communicate what we want to get out of the company (personal satisfaction, money, experiences). Two: it made us understand others better, because quite often, communicating personal wishes is a pain. And three, it became an unconscious goal to meet these challenges.

A few months ago we went through the first few lines we each wrote when we got started. Not only had we taken care of most of the Concerns, Expectations and Priorities we each had, we found we had surpassed them. Not only was it a realization of a job well done, it was also a great motivator for the future.

Concluding thoughts

How often do you have the chance to know what others really need in order to work passionately? Or how they feel the company you’re on should be moving? I imagine not a lot of large companies let everyone dictate direction. But small companies and studios definitely can - and should - let people chime in and take the helm. We chose to use our CEP list to keep everyone focused (even if unconsciously) on our goals. How do you do it in your company? Share a story, if you have one, of dealing with business growth pains in the comments - thanks!

[1]: For those curious, we had a different name for it in portuguese (PEP). This is actually a translation of that name. [2]: The photo in this post (of a slide on Sagmeister’s presentation on Happiness in Design) is by karmagirl on Flickr.

It’s pretty easy to let routine take over. No shame in that, everyone gives in. This weekend we popped out of the same old, same old and decided to build something new - sure, there was a motive (Rails Rumble 2008), but we just took it as an excuse. In 48 hours (well, we slept two full nights, so make that about 24) we sketched, built and privately launched a new product called Melee.

If you do agile work (design or develoment), you probably do the stuff Melee helps you with, but with sticky notes and office walls. Melee is an agile brainstorming app. What does that mean, you ask? Let me give you a couple of use cases.

1) You’re a design and development shop who just got a RFP for a new social network. You might brainstorm a few ideas, throw them at the wall, cluster them, prioritize them, and build a proposal. Melee is your new wall.

2) You’re a development shop that uses SCRUM (ed: if you don’t use it yet, give it a try, you’ll love it). You maintain a product backlog which is a list of things to do, ordered by priority, and before each sprint, you look at the backlog, decide what to do next, and proceed to be awesome for the whole sprint. Melee helps you maintain the backlog.

It’s meant to be used either locally or over the web, so it should be a great tool to dump, cluster and prioritize ideas on those product planning conference calls you all do (we know we do them, at least). It’s all Ajax-based so you see live what others are doing, and they see what you are doing too. The goal is live collaboration.

Anyway, it’s easier to see it rather than reading about it, but since we’re not completely ready to show this baby to you yet, how about a Flickr set with screenshots and photos of the development process? Fine, you say? Well here, then.

Launch details

Melee will hopefully launch as a beta later this week - we’re doing all sorts of work with Totspot and Goplan 2.0 but we *will* get this out to you. Here’s what we can tell you already: there will likely be a free version and a paid version to help with our costs of running the app. In the beginning, it’ll be free for all, anyway. We do hope it’s useful for you and your team. It’s useful for ours - heck, otherwise, we wouldn’t build it. More details really soon, promise. Did I mention that Flickr set already?