37Signals continues to be the star of the new world of web software development.  A new article in BusinessWeek talks about their method of developing web applications called “Getting Real”.

I follow 37Signals and their philosophy with interest since our team is currently in the midst of developing a web application, so hearing ideas on how to best develop them is a good learning experience.

Generally, I like their philosophy, but I think too many people in the media, blogs, and actual companies may be taking it too literally.  Ideas like “less is more” are probably pretty universally true, however ideas like not making product specifications and just building it are more specific to their situation.  First, their team is a group that has experience designing, programming, and has the business background to know what will work.  Not all companies or product teams have well-rounded people.  Some companies are going to have dynamite programmers who can’t design anything visually.  Or designers who are great, but who lack the business background to know what the application should do.

I agree with the basic idea of getting the product out there as fast as possible and then getting user feedback to improve it.  However, if you take that too literally, you could potentially release something that just isn’t very good and get a negative reputation.  For 37Signals, they happen to have a very talented team that can put out a product quickly that’s also good.  Other companies may try that and fall flat on their face.

We’re excited to get this product out there and get that user feedback, we’re trying to keep it simple and clean, but it still needs to be good for these 37Signals concepts to work.  We’ve got a talented team on it, so it should work out just fine.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 18th, 2006 at 1:09 am and is filed under Direct Media Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.