How many times do clients need to ask for a feature before you give it to them?

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Many, many people asked for the ability re-organize to-do lists between projects on Basecamp. An example:

People make mistakes and there’s nothing that drains the enthusiasm of someone on my team than having them spend an hour creating all sorts of to-do lists and then realizing that they were in the wrong project. Yes, it’s their error, but they end up getting really mad at Basecamp because there’s no easy way to correct this mistake.

37 Signals finally implemented this. Sam Stephenson explained how difficult it was.

We started building the move feature in July and wanted to ship it at the beginning of August. But there were other issues preventing it from being deployed. Specifically, we were in the process of moving many terabytes worth of customers’ uploaded files from S3 to our new data center (which is what made it possible for us to build this feature in the first place!). That move had its own set of complications and took longer than we expected.

I can not make up my mind whether their explanation is adequate. 37 Signals also has a lovely sounding policy of not working hard:

37signallers can set their own schedules but I’d say, on average, we work a typical workday (8 hours) and we don’t work weekends. (Unless we’re really feeling a project and don’t want to stop. Then we’ll take that inspiration and run with it.) But normally, it’s a typical workweek.

…Too many people think they have to work 80-100 hour weeks. They think, “No amount of work is too much work.” They pull all-nighters or sleep at the office.

But you don’t have to work superhuman hours. A normal workweek should be plenty. Even less is ok. In fact, being short on time is a good thing. It forces you to focus on the essentials. There’s no time for things that don’t matter. There’s only time for the basics. And if you want to build something great, you have to nail the basics first.

This philosophy would be really cool if they were also delivering, in a timely fashion, the features that are clearly wanted by a very large number of their customers. They are not. The first request in that thread is from January, and I assume they’ve faced that question for years. Certainly, I have wanted the feature for years. And me and all of my friends continue to look for some alternative to Basecamp, because we often find it too limited for our needs. (Unfuddle had some nice features, Github has some nice features, Wrike has some nice features, Remember The Milk had some nice features, activeCollab had some nice features. Right now we are on Basecamp due to inertia and the feeling that we have not found the perfect alternative.)

I think the customers of 37 Signals would be happier if the crew at 37 Signals would work some of those 80-100 hour weeks.

I agree that “if you want to build something great, you have to nail the basics first” but 37 Signals nailed the basics back in 2004. And everyone was impressed at that time. It’s the follow up that has been less dazzling.