Think Small
Posted by andy in : Agile,Teams on July 28, 2006. There is 1 response »Here is a nice podcast from Jason Fried from 37Signals.com
He had an interesting spin on co-location. I always thought distance hurts, and having everyone working together in the same location was critical. Jason argues that if you can’t explain a design or a business strategy using IM or Skipe then it’s too complicated and you should choose something simpler. This made me re-think my views on this.
It’s a really interesting point of view. I have been mulling this over in my mind for a few days now. I wonder what impact people’s learning style has on this? I’m very visual, I really like being able to jump up and draw pictures with collegues around a white board. I wonder if Jason is more of a words person?
One response
Part of the difference is “explain a design” versus “work out a design”. The latter is much harder. Once you have a design, you may be able to articulate its theory over the phone. But during the working out of a design, there is a lot of fumbling around. That’s where it is useful to have every communications channel at hand, not just one (no matter which one). YMMV, but not so very much, I suspect.