Jason Fried’s Post

Transcript

Hey, it's Jason and I want to show you something really cool in Basecamp, this feature called Move the Needle. And the whole point of this feature is to very simply and visually. Present a sense of where things stand subjectively on a project. I know everyone's after certainty all the time. I don't think certainty really exists in a lot of ways. And when it comes to projects especially, there's a range of certainty. And really that means that there's subjectivity about like where things stand, how far along are we, how does it feel? Are we on track? Are we off track? Is there a little bit of risk here? Are we doing well? What are we doing? So this feature allows someone to essentially. Consolidate those feelings into a very simple visual representation of where things stand. Let me show you how that works. So the top of a project, you have this meter here we're calling it move the needle. You can turn this on or off. By the way, if you don't want this in a project, you can just go over to the setup oops at a project details. Wrong one. Edit project details and turn this on or off OU to you. OK so if I click on this here. I'm going to scroll back down, right? This is the full history of needle changes essentially in the project. So it began on May 16th. Andy, who's the designer on the project, kick the project off. On track early, by the way, left means like, you know, starting, right means done. So you know, right now it's kind of early and just some notes, OK. A couple weeks later, there's an update here. We've now kind of moved the needle quite a bit. By the way, the previous position of the needle is always represented as this vertical line here in the gauge. So this is the needle and this is the previous position. So you can see how much more you've moved since the last time it was moved pretty far. A lot of progress, which is typically what happens. You start a new project and like pretty quickly things happen. So you make a lot of progress early on. We're on track. Things are pretty good. Here's some detailed notes about the things that we've we've done. Things that we built, et cetera. OK, scrolling up. Ah, few days later, concerned. So Andy and Brian and I had a design review I think the previous day and we pointed out some stuff that we weren't thrilled about or we wanted to change or something didn't feel quite right. And so we gave Andy these notes. This is like just done over Zoom, about 45 minute call or something like that. And so the next day he marks this as concerned. Like, wow, there's a lot of changes we need to make. I think got some feedback that's going to require some time here. And so he didn't move the needle at all. He just changed the state. And by the way, I'll show you how to do all this stuff in a minute. But he changed the state to concern. So now we're on the record as being a bit concerned. And and Jeff, who's the programmer, he boosted and based campus feature called boosts. You can use emojis, you can write a little small message. It's it's not a full blown comment, just a little bit of a like a reaction, but with your own words. He's like, agreed. Great. OK, so there we are. And there's one comment, Brian said. I wish we were further along, but I'm hopeful if he focused days will put us in good shape and put it in good shape. Great. OK. Moving up, that's June 3rd in the morning. So Andy woke up, went to work, marked this as concern because of the previous day's meeting, and then that same day, June 3rd later in the day. Still concerned, moved the needle a little bit though made some good progress and here's some examples of the progress that was made written up and also some screenshots of some of the things that changed. So this wouldn't make sense to you who's watching this because you didn't see the previous version of this, but change the style completely. And now we've got some really good examples of how this is going to work. So we've got this sort of old school Ledger design. We've got a little tab that shows the total number of hours tracking a project. By the way, I'm not sure I mentioned this or not, but this is a. A new feature we're adding to base camp, which allows you to track time and a base camp project. So that's what this is all about. So these are all new things and you wanted to share those so we could see what that looks like. Still concerned, but lots of progress. Few days later, move the needle again, forward again, again, previous state here, forward. Now we're off of red, we're back to yellow. So there's three states. There's green which is on track, yellow, which is some risk and red is concerned. All right. And now we're not as concerned. We're just some risk, OK, we're at some risk. What does that mean? Well, some risk of getting this done on time, some risk of some changes that we may not know how to do. Again, subjective, but there's three states you can put something in. Explained why some booths here, Jeff, like, got it. Brian's like got it, basically. Also, Jeffrey's on call next week, which means any bugs that require a developer might be hard to get to until the second week of cooldown. So a little bit of risk, OK, moving forward. Same position here, didn't move the needle a little bit more risk a few days later, but some updates. These are direct links to things that have been done. Click that. This is a movie showing this edit feature that he just added. There we are. And by the way, I should just point out that. For those of you who don't know base camp well, and everyone should know base camp well. If you don't know base camp well, get to know base camp. But here we are. So this is a comment thread. This comment thread lives underneath this particular to do. And in Basecamp, all discussions about something happen below the thing itself. You don't go to some other chat thing somewhere else or some other tool or some other product to discuss things. You discuss things always in context, always attached to the thing itself. That way the entire conversation about edit and update entries. Lives on a single page called edit and update entries, and here's the entire conversation. Including if two dudes were completed. Movies, the whole thing. All right, so back to here again and then just yesterday, three days later, we're now back on track made a lot of progress basically feature complete about to jump on QA here. It's in the queue now. Had a great we did a walk through by the way, this is saying we're planning other walk through this afternoon. We did that yesterday. Today is is the 14th. Yesterday afternoon on the 13th, we did the walk through, found a couple minor things, but for the most part, really tight, really in good shape, and here we are. So this is what a project really looks like. This is how things go. Starts out pretty well, makes a lot of progress. I'm not so sure still. OK, OK, now we're feeling better, feel a little bit better still. And now we're finally back on track. This is reality. OK? That's what I love about this feature. It's reality. It's human beings communicating with human beings, talking to each other. Indicating how they feel about things, having discussions. There's no AI here. There's no system tallying up the number of to dos done versus remaining and making a decision about how far along are. We know humans know how far along they are because there's a lot of things happening that don't happen in a product. There's conversations, there's a general feel, there's a degree of confidence. All that stuff is represented here in this needle. And of course, that needle shows up at the top of the project in the current state. So I can go to any project. That has this turned on and I can get a really quick sense of where things stand right now. And of course I want to see the history. I can just go back. Also, if you go to activity and you go to Mission Control, you'll see all the active needles for active projects that are being tracked this way. So I can quickly see at a glance what's going on, where things stand, etcetera. I can click into any one of these. This is a Hey for families feature we're building right now and check out the history of this project as well. So this one has a little bit of risk at some point too. For the most part, it's been going quite well and making some progress. And there we have it. That is move the needle. Hope it was useful. If you have any questions about it, let me know. By the way, this these are the kind of things that really set base Camp apart from the rest of the industry. It's these subtle little subjective details that make this a very, very human product for people who actually have to work together and then people who have to come in and see where things stand and to sort of. Trust each other and understand that humans are doing this work, humans are making decisions, humans have feelings, humans know where things are and how they feel about the project. And these little representations really go a long way to establishing trust on a team and really understanding how things are actually going and not just how a system thinks something is going. Cool, All right. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.