We follow industry standards, as long as we have not discovered something that works better for us

We base our tech stack and our processes on proven standards first. Only when we understand them well enough (which usually means applying and sticking to them for some time), should we then look for improvements or alternatives.

We are not Google nor Facebook, but we are also not a lemonade stand.

We aspire to be among the best, but while the software we build can be complex and unique, we will very rarely face a technical challenge that has not been solved in another context already, so it makes sense to apply known solutions instead of finding our own wherever possible.

Applying proven solutions and leveraging well-tested and mature tools allows us to focus on building the right solutions for our customers instead of inventing processes and building custom tools for solved problems.

Examples

• Coding standards (no need to maintain our own)
• Using libraries and components instead of writing from scratch
• a Team introduces Shape Up "by the book", but over time learns what works for them and what doesn't. Shape Up is just a snapshot of how 37 signals worked at a certain point in time. They iterated on the concept for years before that and certainly have iterated further on it after the book was released. We basically create a fork of Shape Up and do our own iterative changes from then on.
• Deciding to use a SaaS product instead of a self-hosted solution when there is no strong need for running a part of our platform ourselves
• This very guide. We did not invent any of the techniques and principles described here, but we learned from others and combined existing ideas and solutions in a way that makes sense to us.