Freshview Thoughts

Coolest Australian company growing globally

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:53:36 +1000

A couple of weeks back I mentioned that we'd been named finalists for the Australian Cool Company awards. At a glitzy ceremony at PricewaterhouseCoopers HQ in Melbourne on Thursday night we were honored to take out the award for their global growth category.

When you consider these awards cover all industries across the entire country, that's very humbling stuff.

As I mentioned when accepting the award, you can't be a cool company without a cool team behind you, so a big shout out to the Freshview team for making this happen. As well as our team, the judges were also impressed by some of the great companies like Apple, Facebook and Twitter using our software for their email marketing. Maybe we earned some cool points by association.

The prize itself was an awesome black 5'11'' swallow tail surfboard, which we'll be hanging proudly in the office. There are a few surfers in the Freshview team, so we might need to bolt it on so it doesn't go missing.

Congrats should also go to our clever friends (and customers) over at RedBubble for taking out two other awards on the night. Great stuff guys!

Freshview company update

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:14:31 +1000

When you are a web based software company, your customers don't necessarily know a whole lot about you. Many people don't realise we are an Australian company, or that we are relatively small. There is advantages and disadvantages to that, but the Freshview blog is the place to come if you want to find out all about who we are, and what we get up to.

It has been a long time since we introduced you all to a new Freshview team member (in fact, my own introduction back in January 2007 was the last). So today I want to introduce you to all the guys and girls behind Campaign Monitor and MailBuild.

In chronological order, we have:

Dave Greiner, Founder: Dave is the design half of the founding partnership with his mate of many years, Ben. Dave is responsible for the UI of our products, and when he is not obsessing about form layouts obsesses about over-hit backhand slices instead.
Ben Richardson, Founder: As the founder and original developer for Freshview, Ben has a lot of knowledge in his head. Fortunately, frequent table tennis victories have expanded it slightly! Ben also surfs at every opportunity.
Jason Hickey, Developer: As Freshview's first actual employee and core developer, Jason has made huge contributions to both Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. His aggressive table tennis tactics have the rest of the team ducking for cover.
Mathew Patterson, Community Manager: I look after all of you guys through the support system, and do a lot of the blogging, speaking and other out reach activities. 'Creative' uses of the office whiteboards fills in my spare time.
Ken Nguyen, Developer: Arriving to take the load off Jason and Ben, Ken has been involved throughout our applications, and also been crucial in organising the weekly grocery shopping, thereby avoiding the Coke running out and development coming to a standstill.
Bob Carey, Quality Assurance Engineer: We brought Bob all the way from Canada, and when not expounding on incomprehensible details about hockey, he puts in a lot of effort to make sure that Campaign Monitor and MailBuild do the job they were designed for.
Toby Brain, Developer: After coming through our intern program in 2007, Toby has joined the team permanently and has already built some excellent features into our products. Toby claims to have already heard all the 'Pinky and the Brain' jokes theoretically possible, but we'll keep trying.
Phil Gilmore, Developer: Whether you want some .Net development work done, a mountain climbed, a road trip companion, or a law of nature explained, Phil is your man. His first big project was the crucial Lunch 1.0 release.
Diana Potter, Community support (USA): As our very first US based team member, Diana has very quickly become known to a lot of you! Some say she answers emails so fast that sometimes people have received replies before they have sent in their question...or before they even knew they had a question to ask. Spooky!
Travis Bell, Community support: Our second Canadian import, Travis brings a lot of support, scripting and design experience to the team. Combined with that is an uncanny ability to comprehend Bob's hockey talk, and an abiding love for all things Apple.
Karen Clark, Office Manager: It's no use having sweet offices if they are filled with disorganised chaos. Karen's arrival to handle everything required in keeping things running smoothly has given us all, especially Dave and Ben, more time to focus on the things we do well. Never leave Karen!
Davida Fernandez, Community support (USA): Our second USA based team member, Davida will soon be challenging Diana as "Queen of all Campaign Monitor and MailBuild Knowledge". It's not a catchy title, but the benefits are pretty good. When you need support during US business hours, you'll appreciate Davida and Diana as much as we do.
Scott Randall, System Administrator: The newest member of our team, Scott is that 'right person' we've been hunting down for a long time. Scott will be responsible for keeping everything running, and for setting our future technical direction to make sure we can handle all the emails you can send!

So now you've got an idea who we are, we'd love to meet you too. So if you are attending a conference like Web Directions or Web Design World that we attend, come up and say hi! We don't bite (well, except for Jason, and he's on special tablets ;)

How cool is that!

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:47:49 +1000

Every country has their awards to aspire to. Whether it's the Inc 500, the Deloitte Fast 50 or the Golden Raspberry. One particular award I've admired since it launched a couple of years back is the Australian Cool Company award.

Presented by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Australian Anthill magazine (a favourite around the Freshview office) the awards focus on rewarding that hard to define concept of "cool". Here's their take on what that means...

Cool Companies manage to stay one step ahead of the rest. They breed leaders who are rule-makers and rule-breakers. They are organisations that aspire to be admired. They are trend-setters in attitude and action. Quite simply, they are cool.

Who wouldn't want to be described like that! On a whim, I entered Freshview a couple of months back, then forgot all about it. A few days ago I got an email thanking me for entering, and link to check out the 24 finalists for the 2008 award. Amazingly, Freshview has been nominated in not one, but two categories - online business, and global growth.

While most of our work is focused on markets overseas, it's awesome to see all the hard work our team has been putting in these past few years being recognised locally. Even if we don't take the award itself out, just knowing we're considered one of the 20 coolest companies in the country is ~~good~~ cool enough for me. The awards are announced September 25 at a ceremony in Melbourne. Wish us luck!

Mixing with our mentors in Boston

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:46:02 +1000

Last week Ben and I were lucky enough to spend a few days in Boston at the annual Business of Software conference. It takes a special kind of event to get us to fly to the other side of the planet for only two days, but just like last year's event, it was well worth it. The conference is put on by Neil Davidson of Red Gate Software, easily the nicest guy in the business, and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software (yep, that Joel). These are two guys I have enormous respect for. Over the years they have personally taught me a great deal about how to run a software company, and have fun doing it.

We managed to see some great talks from the likes of Seth Godin (of purple cow fame), Jason Fried (a customer, friend and all round nice guy) and Eric Sink (a big inspiration for starting Freshview in the first place). It was also great to see a live usability demo from Steve Krug, which is just the motivation I needed to start including guerilla usability testing in our design process. Just like last year's conference, most of the sessions were inspirational or informative, and gave us plenty to think about.

But, as is the case for most events like this, it's the conversations you have outside the presentations that are the most valuable. It's not every day you can take Jason Fried out for coffee in the morning and then Joel Spolsky out to dinner that night. The web's an amazing thing for learning and sharing, but nothing beats some face to face time with real people. Even if they do tell Boston jokes that fly right over my head.

We also finally got the chance to catch up with Ben Chestnut, founder of the very cool MailChimp. I've been a big fan of Ben's blog for a long time now, and we're both doing some interesting stuff in the email marketing space. We recommend all of our customers who aren't comfortable coding their own emails to check them out, so it was great to finally meet him in the flesh. We also came up with some interesting ways we can work together in the future. Amazing what kinds of ideas surface over a few beers!

Judging by the feedback from other attendees, it looks like the conference will be on again next year, so if you're interested in smart, practical advice on running a software company, it's not one to miss.

Applications open for Summer 2008/2009 Internships

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:03:34 +1000

Wow, has it been a year already? Hot on the heels of our successful inaugural program last year, we've just opened the doors for students interested in doing an 8-12 week internship at Freshview from December to March.

Why should I bother applying?

We do things differently at Freshview, and I'm not just talking about the $800/week salary, free catered lunches and private offices. Our internships expose you to every facet of working in a software company. From writing real, shippable code for our applications to helping out with marketing, design and even talking to customers.

What happened last year?

After a ton of applications from some great students, phone interviews and a group interview process at the Freshview office, we selected Toby and Daniel as our inaugural interns. They didn't disappoint. Here are just some of the features developed by the guys based on customer requests and their own input.

A component allowing customers to compare multiple campaign results in a single Flash and AJAX powered report.
An application that automatically converts externally referenced style sheets in a HTML file to inline CSS as per W3C specifications. Our customers loved this.
A significant new feature that relied on heavily optimized queries across database tables with hundreds of millions of rows. It was very popular.

While the guys got loads of great stuff done, there was still plenty of time for them to make us all look bad when we had surfing lessons and played laser skirmish. At least us old guys got some revenge when we took them on at lawn bowls! Here's what one of the guys had to say about last years program...

"Working as a Freshview intern was an awesome opportunity! The environment was supportive, friendly and most of all lots of fun. The best part was, I had the opportunity to work on actual application features used by thousands of people worldwide and learned more about software development than I could ever learn at Uni. Plus, my ping pong game has never been better!"
- Daniel Bowden, Wollongong University, Summer 2007

At the end of the program, we offered a full-time position to one of the interns, who is currently working with us part-time while he finishes his degree. For a full write-up on what the guys accomplished, check out this post.

OK, I'm interested. What now?

We've put together a page outlining the program, what we're looking for and how you can apply. Head on over to get started. Applications close on Tuesday September 30, 2008 but we review them as they come in, so all available openings may be taken well before that date. If you're interested, apply now.

Tools we use: Skitch

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:36:55 +1000

In the last "tools we use" post, I mentioned the excellent HelpSpot application, which we use for all our support. Today's featured tool is also used in support, but in a slightly different way.

Even though Campaign Monitor and MailBuild are both pretty straight forward, there is times when we need to explain how to do something specific, or where to find something.

Some of those questions are answered by the narrated videos, but others are one off or less broad. In those cases, I love to use Skitch. Skitch is a tool from Plasq, the awesome Mac developers also responsible for Comic Life. They are so smart they even use Campaign Monitor for some of their newsletters!

Plasq have a tagline for Skitch - "Snap, Draw, Share!" - which is pretty descriptive. You load Skitch, and take a quick snap of any part of your screen, draw over the top of it, and then you can automagically make it publicly or privately shared.

I love to use Skitch to make super quick screengrabs of different parts of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild, annotating the image to show where a setting is or where to click. I've got a folder setup on the Campaign Monitor site, and Skitch can automatically upload the image and give me back a URL for it, which I can paste into my HelpSpot response.

It will do timed screenshots too, which is helpful when showing drop downs like in the screenshot above. Skitch literally saves minutes of faffing about taking screenshots, editing sizes, uploading in FTP clients and so on, every single time I use it.

A clear screenshot can also save a lot of back and forth with customers when trying to explain in text something that can be understand visually much more easily. I highly recommend you try out Skitch yourself. You can signup for the public beta right now at no cost.

Freshview Favourites: Books

Thu, 29 May 2008 13:47:54 +1000

Although we're all the way down on the bottom of the globe, thanks to the magic of Amazon we can now get books at reasonable prices here in Sydney. I've surveyed the Freshview team and come up with a few recent favourites.

Code Complete by Steve McConnell
Selected by Jason, Freshview developer — "for developers starting out and for those with experience but who haven't really been following best practices, or any at all, Code Complete is a must read".

Good to Great by by Jim Collins
Selected by Dave, Freshview founder and designer — "Simple, practical advice using real world examples on how to build a great business".

Chicago Manual of Style by University of Chicago Press
Selected by Diana, Community and Support guru — "Not the most interesting read but where else are you going to turn to when you can't remember if it's e-mail or email?".

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Selected by Ben, founder and developer — "written about 15 years ago, and has no mention of the Internet, but very relevant to online businesses operating today".

Getting Real by 37Signals
Selected by Travis, Community and support guru — "Do they still even make books? (you're talking about that paper kind right?); Getting Real is highly relevant"

Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Selected by Mathew, Community Manager — "Packed full of great stories and advice on using blogging to connect and converse with your customers".

Not everybody find books the most useful way to learn, but if they work for you, you could do worse than check these out. We'll post in the future about other favourites among the Freshview team; if you want to find out something specific, just ask!

Freshview's new application

Fri, 02 May 2008 10:39:57 +1000

With Campaign Monitor and MailBuild growing well, the Freshview team has been expanded recently. It now includes our new developer, Phil, our fully imported from Canada support and community guy, Travis, and our sole representative to the entire Northern Hemisphere, Diana.

With extra development resources available, we've been able to spend some time on a brand new product, which we are all pretty excited about. This product, although still a web application, is a bit of change of direction for Freshview and today we're giving you a sneak peek.

Introducing.....Lunch 1.0

Sick of having to walk all the way downstairs and across the road to the sandwich place? Embarrased by the thought of speaking to somebody in person? Irritated by the people in line who don't have their order ready when they get to the front? Lunch 1.0 is for you!

End your lunch ordering troubles forever!

OK, maybe I'm overselling it a little. This is actually a little internal application that sits on the Freshview intranet. Now that we have free lunches for all staff, we found that a lot of time was being wasted running about trying to make sure each person's order had been taken.

So this little one page application just lets everyone order their lunch (up to 11am) and then faxes off the order to our local sandwich place. They deliver around 12:30 and we can all eat together, with only 60 seconds of effort involved per person.

As well as adding your order, you can see what you have already eaten recently, and also copy and modify other team members creations for yourself. It's a good way to get out of the 'ham, cheese and tomato' rut!

Thanks go to new developer Phil who put it all together! Feature requests are already arriving for version 2, including a reminder about 'junk food Fridays' and some smarts for public holidays.

Popular sandwiches from Freshview staff

"The Peterson"
Multigrain sandwich with roast beef, tomato, cheese, cucumber, and mayo

"Sandwich mountain"
Multigrain sandwich, butter, ham, all salads except spinach instead of lettuce, swiss cheese, salt + pepper

"Gluteus Minimus"
Turkey sandwich on Gluten-free bread, all salads except tomato and onion, hot mustard, pepper and tasty cheese

Suggestions for great sandwiches are welcome!

Freshview interns produce the goods!

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:17:21 +1000

When we launched our intern program last year, we had high hopes for success, but no real idea of how it was going to work out. Now that the first program has been run, we wanted to let you all know how it was arranged, what the experience was like and what the outcomes were.

Choosing the right people

We had quite a few promising applications from prospective interns, so the first step was to find the best candidates. We used a process of phone screening adapted from the one Joel Spolsky has spoken about to pick the people who seemed to be the most suitable, the best fit and who were available when we needed them to be.

That got us down to 5 really strong possibilities, and we invited them all to come into our offices in Sutherland for a few hours. At that time we were mid-build on the fancy new offices so the day was held partially in the old office, and partially in the new one.

We ran it on a Saturday, which worked better for the potential interns who had varying University schedules, and most of the Freshview team was involved in meeting the applicants. After an introductory chat we split into groups, and the interview process was started.

Each applicant did a short written programming task, met with the Ben and Jason our developers and also chatted with the Dave and I, on the design, marketing and support side. The idea was to get a good idea of both technical and communication skills, and of that nebulous concept of 'fit'.

Finally, we retired downstairs for a catered lunch over the ping pong table, where we all chatted and we had a chance to see how everyone interacted. It was a tough decision, but a few days later we offered internships to Dan and Toby.

We know what the interns did last summer

In December Toby and Dan joined us to start their 8 week program. As promised, they were involved pretty much right away in working on actual features for Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. We always have plenty of ideas and plans for our products, and having two smart developers suddenly available meant we could release some cool new stuff.

Here are just some of the features coded up almost totally by Toby and Dan, based on customer requests, internal priorities and their own input. They worked to flexible specs that left them plenty of room to show their skills.

Subscriber snapshots - a great new way to see how an individual recipient has opened, clicked or otherwise acted on all the emails you have sent to them.
Exporting segments - this was a very popular request and makes it easy for people to pull out different groups of people, like RSVPs or inactive subscribers.
Automatic plain text version - Kick start your plain text emails by pulling all the text out of your HTML version instantly
Generate inline styles - another huge time saver, this one lets you design with styles in the head of your page, and have them automagically made inline when importing. Great for Gmail recipients.
Campaign comparison - A super slick way to take reports from two or more of your campaigns, and compare opens, clicks, bounces and more, in a new Flash chart format.

Those boys sure earned their money! There was still plenty of time for fun though, and Toby and Dan more than held their own during the Freshview surfing lessons and Christmas party laser tag.

At the end of their time with us, all agreed that it had been well worthwhile, both for the interns themselves to experience working in a software company, and for us at Freshview who got a lot more work done, and a chance to see some young developers in action. In fact, we've since employed one of our interns who will be working with us part time while finishing his degree up, and hopefully beyond.

2008 intern program - are you interested?

We're going to be running the intern program again this year, and we'll be looking for another 2 or 3 undergraduate computer science students to join us for 8 to 12 weeks. It's a paid program run over the summer, and as you can see there is plenty of scope to do cool things, learn a lot and have some fun.

Head over to the Annual Internship Program page, where you can add your email address to get notified when applications open. We're looking forward to meeting some of you!

Webstock in Wellington: It's about story

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:06:57 +1000

Earlier this month I made the short hop across the ocean from Sydney to Wellington, New Zealand, for Webstock 08. Webstock promised "Truckloads of design, development, user experience, web standards, content, community, innovation & inspiration", and certainly delivered.

As well as finding out why they call it windy Wellington, I met a ton of cool people, including some Campaign Monitor and MailBuild customers who had some great feedback for us. In fact, early on day 1, at the registration desk, I spotted a fellow attendee wearing a Campaign Monitor t-shirt!

The conference proper was tremendously well run, great swag, decent food and the main hall featured seating around tables, which I found both different and helpful in talking to people.

Awesome talks from Freshview favourites Dan Cederholm and Kathy Sierra were accompanied with some other great speakers on a variety of topics.

One theme I've noticed starting to take hold in web design and business generally is the idea of 'telling a story', and several speakers focused on that point, including Jason Santa Maria. I expect to see more of this in 2008, including a lot of people helping businesses to craft their own stories.

The two days went by quickly, and too soon I was back in Sydney. Thanks to everyone who came up and said hello, and hello to everybody I met in Wellington (and a special hello to the Indian woman singing 'ice ice baby', to her baby, in the hotel).

Freshview goes surfing

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:15:32 +1000

One of the cool things about working at Freshview is our 'First Friday Fun' - the idea is that once a month we take a Friday afternoon off to do something fun as a team. In the past we've played Lawn Bowls, Ten Pin bowling, seen a movie and had table tennis lessons from a gold medallist.

Last Friday, on a beautiful summers day in Sydney, we all drove the 10 minutes from the office to our local Cronulla beach for some surfing lessons. Freshview founders Dave and Ben are both keen surfers, but the rest of us....let's just say table tennis holds far less risk of drowning.

So it was with some trepidation we all got kitted up and hopped into the water. After a brief, yet embarrassing stint in the safety of the rock pool. we'd 'mastered' the art of paddling and eskimo rolls, and we were allowed in the actual ocean.

Then followed an hour or so of spectacular falls, flailing arms and the occasional moments of surfing glory. The young interns Dan and Toby showed the rest of us up by standing up within minutes and spending the rest of the time cruising past, as if they we're on a travelator.

Meanwhile, Dave and Ben stood at the shore taking photographs and making 'encouraging' remarks. Developers, QA and support team members got there eventually however, and nobody was lost to the sea (good news for Campaign Monitor and MailBuild users).

The final score: Ocean: 378 defeated Nerds: 6.

As we retired for a quiet beer, the stories were already being exaggerated, and it was only the release of photographic evidence several days later that restored the truth. This one is going to be hard to top!

North Shore eat your heart out!

Paddle practice in the rockpool

It's all about style

Jason gets up

Bob entertaining the crowd

You can check out more pics of the day on Flickr.

Looking for an interface design guru

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:59:26 +1000

We've been lucky enough to fill many of the positions we mentioned a couple of months back, and today we're announcing a brand new position for a web interface designer to join the Freshview team.

I won't go into the details because the position page says it all. If you're interested in the job, we'd love to hear from you. Likewise, if you know anyone who might be a good match, please pass this on to them.

Computerworld says Freshview is worth watching

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:32:10 +1000

A great piece of recognition for Freshview in a recent article by Len Rust for Computerworld called "Aussies worth watching".

It's awesome to be noted as an Australian success story, but we've still got plenty of work to be getting on with, so there's hopefully more success to come. If you want to be a part of that, don't forget that we're looking to expand our team.

There's plenty of room around the lunch table for the right people, so if that's you or someone you know, get in touch.

Tools we use: HelpSpot

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:16:32 +1000

One of the great advantages of producing software for web designers is that typically, our customers are pretty damn smart. That means they don't often need to ask us for help with using Campaign Monitor or MailBuild.

Sometimes things go wrong, or something's a bit unclear, or they just have an awesome idea for us, and people get in touch with us by email. Multiply that by all the thousands of customers around the world, and it adds up. To handle all that incoming mail, and the ongoing conversations, we use a great piece of software called HelpSpot from Userscape.

HelpSpot is essentially a web based issue tracking tool that fully integrates with your email. So when our customers email us, it pops up in our HelpSpot workspace and is immediately trackable, so nothing gets lost. As they come in the emails can be filtered, tags can be applied automatically, replies to existing issues are assigned to the right person and much more.

So our design and development team each have their own HelpSpot inbox, and issues are transferred to the person who can solve them as needed. If you've emailed support before, we can look up your previous issues and see what has happened, so we don't have to cover old ground.

For issues which pop up more often, we have a bunch of prepared response snippets we can insert and modify as required, which means a much faster and more detailed response. When we combine that capability with the reporting, we can easily see which parts of the application could use some improvements, and we know where to spend our time.

One recent improvement we've made uses HelpSpot as a form of monitoring tool. Even though we have all kinds of hardware and software monitoring in place for our applications and servers, some problems are spotted much faster by people than they are by any kind of system.

We've found in the past that our customers are pretty good at letting us know if something's gone wrong with a rush of support emails. However, sometimes it would happen overnight, and we wouldn't find out until other monitoring woke someone up.

Now we've harnessed HelpSpot so that it counts the number of requests coming in, and if it crosses certain thresholds triggers a system that will ring the phone of the person responsible for fixing it. Since it is web based, we can easily check it from home. (No, that is not a request to send 20 emails in a row to try and wake us up at night!).

There's lots more to HelpSpot, and it is a pretty key part of keeping everything running here at Freshview. We'd definitely recommend checking it out if you are finding a standard email client is not enough any more.

Building the ultimate office for software developers

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:05:15 +1000

When we moved Freshview into a much larger space at the end of 2006, we figured we had enough room to get us to the end of our 3 year lease. There were only 3 of us at the time, so 160 square meters (that's about 525 square feet) seemed like it would do the trick even if we added a few more people to the team. While our customer base was growing very quickly, we were big fans of scaling our software without necessarily having to scale our team with it.

Starting open plan

We went for an open plan layout in the office for a couple of reasons. The first being that it's by far the easiest and most cost effective way to lay out an office. Secondly, with only 3 of us in all that space there weren't a whole lot of distractions and it allowed us to communicate very easily. Basically, it worked.

Over the next 6 months or so we were lucky enough to double our customer base, revenues and inevitably, our team size. Before too long we added another 4 great people to the team, not to mention an extremely popular (and recently upgraded) ping pong table. We still had plenty of room, but one thing soon became clear. Open plan offices don't scale well for software developers.

Getting into the zone

You see, software development is a little different to most other jobs. To be truly productive, developers need time to really "get in the zone". To get their best work done, they need to phase out all the other distractions around them and be genuinely focused on the task at hand. This is when the really good stuff happens. Unfortunately, this isn't something that can be switched on or off instantly, it takes focus and time (from a few minutes to half an hour). As you can imagine, a ping pong ball to the forehead can be quite the flow killer. Over time, lots of these small distractions can prevent smart people from getting things done and generally piss them off at the same time.

This isn't just something we've learned from experience either. Peopleware, a must-read for any software developer (and especially their managers) devotes an entire section to the importance of removing distractions from the office environment. Joel Spolsky's famous Joel Test dedicates number 8 out of 12 to making sure your programmers have quiet working conditions and 37signals have long advocated the importance of alone time.

Of course, not everybody feels the same way about open plan, which is clearly why so many software companies still use that format. We had our doubts about the open plan approach working long term, and so we decided to look for some alternate space that would allow us to create an environment perfect for keeping our growing team happy and productivity high.

Time to move... again

Eventually we settled on some recently vacated space a few levels above us in the same building. It was double the size of our current office and gave us a blank slate to plan our dream setup. Similar to the approach Fog Creek took in their planning, we put together a wish list and then approached a number of architects to make it a reality.

Above all else, the priority was for closed offices for all our developers, a nice big area where people can relax and take a break, and a communal eating area where we could all have lunch together. Oh, and it needed to scale to support 20 staff members, we didn't want to move again in a hurry.

Closed offices and catered lunches

Working with the talented team at Watershed Design, we eventually had a layout that would give us closed offices for 8 developers and very large, private workstations for 11 other team members who aren't writing code. We used loads of glass and timber to keep as much natural light flowing through each office. We also ended up with a large breakout area for relaxing and working on your ping pong game. To make everything feel as open as possible, we also cut out a big chunk of the roof and added some cool lighting.

Here are a few photos of the finished product, which you can click for a larger version.

Big closed offices for our developers, most with a nice outlook over the park

A sweet entrance and reception area

Our 2 meeting tables

Funky closed offices and over-sized workstations

One of our biggest concerns about moving from open plan to closed offices was killing the awesome vibe we have around the office. The entire team get along extremely well and while the older layout was occasionally distracting, it was also plenty of fun. To alleviate this, we've since introduced free fully-catered lunches for the team. We now eat together every single day, which has made a huge difference and is something I wish we introduced a long time ago. It's also a fantastic way for newer team members to get to know their workmates in a very informal setting (not that it ever gets formal around here anyway).

Now that everyone has a closable door you don't need to tippy toe around the rest of the office, but can chat to other members of the team knowing you're not distracting anyone else. If the door's shut, come back another time or send them an IM or email. No more flow breaking or ping pong head shots.

Was it worth it?

From start to finish, the fitout took about 4 months to complete and we couldn't be happier with the result. We moved in mid November 2007 and have already measured a tidy improvement in the amount we're all getting done. Even more importantly, after a casual survey of the team while writing this article, every staff member prefers the new closed office environment over open plan.

Going closed office might not be the cheapest or most intuitive option, but given the increase in productivity and positive feedback from the team, I can't recommend it enough for small, growing software teams.