Our Active Projects

As you know, the WooTeam is located all across the world; so managing all of our activities effectively, and making sure that we’re all on (approximately) the same page at all times, is quite a challenge. To help us lighten the management-load a bit, we – just like most other web-savvy geeks – use Basecamp to track our daily activities & tasks on one, easy-to-access platform.

So we wanted to give you a bit of an overview of how we use Basecamp for internal management, as well as interacting with all of our outside collaborators. At any given time, we’re interacting with 10 – 20 different people, on different areas of our business, with different WooTeam members in charge of managing the respective processes. It is thus quite challenging at times, but I’d like to think that we have a solid system in place, which has allowed us to keep most of the important things on the radar.

Here’s how we do it…

Less E-mail; Permanent Storage

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of our Basecamp-usage, I need to explain why we use the platform… For obvious reasons, we’re trying to eliminate unnecessary e-mails (those where everyone needs to be CC’ed) between team members; so with Basecamp the information is accessible to everyone that might need to see it, but only the people that need the info to act upon it, get notified. The whole team thus knows what’s going on (with Basecamp acting as a status report of kinds) and they have the option of checking in on this any time they want or need to (not when they’re e-mailed unnecessarily).

The second main reason for using Basecamp (over e-mail), is the fact that all of our most important data, decisions & discussions are kept in one, central place. This is important, considering our geographical differences, as well as helping us when we’re not at our normal workplace (i.e. traveling). We’ve also found that this is great for accountability & efficiency in making sure that all to-do’s are handled in due time & as planned.

Milestones & To-do’s

We aren’t extremely “strict” when it comes to committing to deadlines or living by a rigid to-do list. But in recent weeks, we’ve tried to include some of the most important stuff as milestones. Have a look…

Milestones

With this approach to To-do’s & Milestones, I think we’re giving the whole team quite an overview of what’s happening in the future. So the to-do’s aren’t as much a medium to make sure all of the work gets done, but rather puts the work we’re doing at the moment in context (since the to-do’s relate to future milestones). To explain: when you’re doing WordPress development day-in, day-out, it becomes difficult to see the holistic view of all the activities, but with proper milestones, we are constantly reminded of upcoming stuff.

Collaborations

Another extremely important feature of our business, is the fact that we absolutely love to collaborate with cool people outside of our own team. This has lead to us working with some of the best web designers around at the moment and recently also enabled us to translate all of our themes into 15+ languages.

In recent weeks though, we’ve found an even more valuable use for Basecamp collaborations with our beta testers, who has helped us iron out bugs in our themes, prior to release.

The Beta Free-for-All

The first thing we do via Basecamp, is to give our beta testers access to upcoming themes and then we facilitate the conversation surrounding possible bugs & tweaks on there. We have however also opened it up to posting theme concepts (i.e. ideas or designs only) on there for feedback, whilst any of the beta testers can start a new topic on anything. The great thing about this interaction is that it’s not being limited or organized; so we’re allowed access to some awesome ideas that are generated by our beta testers (who are some of the coolest WooThemes users around).

Conclusion

As I’m sure you can see, Basecamp is an integral part of the way we operate and whilst I wouldn’t go as far as saying that we’d be lost without it; we’d definitely not be able to run as smoothly as we do without it.

By now you know that we’re a pretty open & transparent bunch when it comes to running our business. We’d like to believe that the experiences & knowledge we’ve shared has added value, that exceeds that of our products individually. So with that in mind, we’ll be doing a few “behind-the-scenes”-type posts every now and again, to give you a more in-depth look at the different aspects of WooThemes.

To kick this off, we wanted to share some thoughts on our Support processes…

Support Resources

Since our themes are GPL licensed, there’s a big emphasis on all of our support resources (which includes the forum, our knowledgebase, tutorials and also our Affiliated Woo Workers). You’ll note that you’d only be able to see those pages if you were a WooThemes customer, because those have been “locked down” for general public use.

Why? Well, as mentioned there’s a massive emphasis within our business on creating top-notch, valuable resources that are only available to WooUsers. Since piracy is becoming more and more of an issue (plus legally our themes are allowed to be distributed), we need to make sure that only paying customers get the benefit of these fantastic resources.

In the same vein, we’ve been spending quite a bit of time of late improving our theme documentation, as that is probably one of the most valuable resources that our members have available to them. Our focus is thus on maintaining and improving these resources, which further justifies the price tag associated with being a WooThemes member.

E-mail Support

Another thing we encounter quite often, are e-mails requesting technical support. Even though our contact page clearly mentions that these kind of requests need to be directed to the forum, people are sometimes ignorant and / or lazy… So whilst we always decline those requests (again – directing them to the forum instead), we’re not doing so because we want to be unhelpful; instead we’re just looking after our business. Here’s why we do things this way:

• Firstly, we need to make sure that only paying customers are getting support from us. This is done to be fair to our customers (as they paid for support) and also to safeguard the sustainability of our business.
• Secondly – if we had to answer every question via e-mail, that valuable information / solution would only be available to one person. If we answer it on the forum, we cut out publishing duplicate solutions, plus we make it available to all of our users, instead of just one person. This again increases the sustainability of our support function, as well as creating an extremely valuable (and extensive) knowledgebase.

Does that make a little more sense? Doesn’t seem like we’re monsters in any way, does it?

Fact is, as WooThemes is growing, we need to make sure that the business (and all of its processes) scales along with the growth in user numbers. If we don’t scale the business properly, you’ll begin to see a drop-off in quality, as well as quantity relating to new themes, answering support requests, new blog posts and even tweeting. So by getting the right boundaries in place, we’re just increasing the likelihood that we’ll scale properly…

(Note: This however doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to walk the extra mile for our customers!)