You often hear the recommendation of “Let’s have a meeting” and “Let’s communicate more”. At RunSignUp we think meetings and communicating are a waste of time.
Mark Nigro, the CTO at Bluestone Software and a very bright man, introduced me to the concept that communicating and having meetings was a waste of time. His concept was built around simplicity. Have a clear vision, have a clear set of tasks and define simple, common methods for communicating. This was built on his computer science foundational concept of building everything as a component with a clean API that others could could use if they needed to.
We obviously follow this from how we have built RunSignUp and the Open API we have built so it is easy to interoperate with our system as well as inside our system.
In fact, the fact that we have designed our system from the beginning to be self-service is an important part of our strategy. It means that a customer can do anything they want and not have to reply on talking with someone at RunSignUp. This gives our customers more power in their hands, and lowers our overall cost of doing business. Just like avoiding an unnecessary meeting 🙂
We have also designed the company in a similar fashion. People have pretty clear sets of functions and goals. We have a clear vision of being here to serve our customers. So the need for internal communication is fairly limited.
We have defined a set of communication mechanisms that are used internally and externally. This blog is one of them – it is how we communicate new features to our entire team as well as our customers in one, clean interface that can be searched. The same for all of our How To Videos as well as our Customer Case Studies and Customer Videos.
Anyway, I wanted to share this (with our company and our customers and partners!) since it had come to mind over the past day as we released a number of advances. This approach is one of the reasons we can move so quickly and will continue to move forward fast.