Culture through the eyes of Netflix

Real Interesting and valuable perspective.

Culture

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37 signals

For those of you who aren't familiar with 37 signals, they are a bleeding edge software company building new ways or working and reinventing the process of software company success - both development and business success.

Here are the actual 37 "Signals"

1) Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service.

2) Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you don’t actually control.

3) You have the most information when you’re doing something, not before you've done it.

4) Stuff that was impossible just a few years ago is simple today.

5) Failure is not a prerequisite for success.

6) Don’t make assumptions about how big you should be ahead of time.

7) Don’t sit around and wait for someone else to make the change you want to see.

8) When you build what you need, you can assess quality directly instead of by proxy.

9) Solving your own problem lets you fall in love with what you’re making.

10) What you do matters, not what you think or say or plan.

11) When you want something bad enough, you make the time.

12) The perfect time to start something never arrives.

13) Start a business, not a startup.

14) You need a committment strategy, not an exit strategy.

15) Huge organizations talk instead of act, and meet instead of do.

16) Build half a product, not a half-assed product.

17) Getting to greatness starts by cutting out stuff that’s merely good.

18) The real world isn’t a place, it's an excuse. It's a justification for not trying.

19) The big picture is all you should be worrying about in the beginning. Ignore the details.

20) Decide. You’re as likely to make a great call today as you are tomorrow.

21) The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch.

22) It’s the stuff you leave out that matters.

23) Focus on substance, not fashion. Focus on what won't change.

24) When good enough gets the job done, go for it.

25) When you make tiny decisions, you can't make big mistakes.

26) Pour yourself into your product.

27) You rarely regret saying no but you often regret saying yes.

28) Better your customers grow out of your product, than never grow into them.

29) You can’t paint over a bad experience with good marketing.

30) All companies have customers. Fortunate companies have audiences too.

31) Instead of out-spending your competitors, out-teach them.

32) Let customers look behind the curtain.

33) Leave the poetry in what you make, there is beauty in imperfection.

34) Marketing is not a department, it's the sum total of everything you do.

35) Don’t hire for pleasure; hire to kill pain.

36) Don’t make up problems you don’t have yet.

37) A business without a path to profit is a hobby.

Happy Marketing.

-James

Selling change

Making a disruption or introduction is never free of distracters, fear or hurdles.  Especially when you change a process with technology, do the naysayers and status-quo evangelists step up (usually because they don’t appreciate or value the differences the technological change will bring – to them).   

Answer: it's less the fear of change than the hassle of change. What we have now is working; the new thing requires learning the new way and figuring out how to move existing assets (files, data, software, configuration, workflows) to the new platform or system.

Specific Industries are more susceptible to this, but nearly all battle or submit to the hurdles to adoption of change.  We can help to lay-out the ease of our process in emphasizing how much focus we place on training and configuration and user community ease-of-adoption.  We can show prospects how our expertise is not just technology and solving problems with it, but to ensure employee adoption is a priority and skill we maintain. 

In addition, many of our development plans focus on adding new functionality to win new deals, or upgrading functionality to help existing customers. But what about our competitor's customers? How can we help them? Do you want them to drop what they've been doing and switch to you? If "yes," we need to make it a development and marketing priority. Make "Switch" a development and marketing theme for an entire release or series of releases. Develop tools to move their data, workflows, scripts, configurations. And create marketing programs to explain how easy you've made it to switch.

 Great Quote...

 "Change is measured in dollars and sense."

Happy Changing.  

James Dobbs