Chad and Lindsey take listeners behind the scenes and go deep into the nitty-gritty of recent thoughtbot company changes driven by the pandemic and the organization's need (and desire!) to go fully remote – all while reaffirming and revisiting the organization's values, mission, and purpose as part of the process.
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Transcript:
CHAD PYTEL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel.
LINDSEY CHRISTENSEN: And I'm your other host, Lindsey Christensen. And we're back. Thanks for tuning in.
CHAD: We've missed you.
LINDSEY: Yes. We’ve been kind of busy.
CHAD: We've been busy, and we knew we were going to take a break after the last season. We didn't necessarily know for quite how long, and then a whole bunch of stuff happened, which we're going to tell you about today. From the last episode, you heard about the change to the thoughtbot CEO, and we alluded to some changes that we've made to the company. And we're going to talk about those today.
LINDSEY: Yeah. And in true thoughtbot Giant Robots fashion, we’ll go behind the scenes and give you the nitty-gritty of why things happened and how it's going because it's all really interesting.
CHAD: Yeah. I think on the surface, it's really easy to think about how maybe these changes have been entirely driven by the need to go remote or the desire to go remote. And the reality was that's an important part of it, but it really was so much more than that. Some of these changes that we've made are ones we've been talking about for a long time. And it wasn't until almost a year of operating in a different way that we said, “We need to make some of these changes in order to accommodate remote and working from anywhere.” And we fell back on a lot of other problems we needed to solve along the way.
LINDSEY: So we actually decided to break out remote work into its own episode, which will be the next episode. And I'm sure it's going to come up today, but it's a whole other area of changes and focus, whereas some of the reorg changes that we just underwent solved a lot or are trying to solve a number of challenges that we've been working on over the years. So I guess to start off, before we reorganized, how did we function? And that was largely geographically based.
CHAD: Yeah. And the geographic basis means that we had a studio in a city, and in that studio, we offered the complete thoughtbot services. And that was driven by this idea back in 2012 when we started to expand. Prior to that, we really held the company to less than 30 people. And we were primarily a group of people all in one location working together, and we were all of what thoughtbot was. And we really liked that. We liked the structure. But people wanted to move and live somewhere else. And our purpose is that we believe that there's a better way to work. And we want to share it with as many people as possible, although we've revised that purpose now as part of this process. And so I really remember the day we were having a company meeting, and someone stood up and said, “If we really believe we have a better way to work, why are we not trying to bring it to more people? Why are we losing these great team members only because they want to live somewhere else?” But we also really liked the small, close-knit team of people who worked closely together on client work. We had done some client projects that were split across teams and across time zones and that kind of stuff. And it just didn't feel as good as we wanted it to feel, especially because it was hybrid.
And so we said, “We know exactly what a great thoughtbot looks like. Instead of trying to expand what that great thoughtbot looks like, let's try to replicate it instead.” And so when someone wanted to move to a new city, we said, “That’s great.” We looked at the market in the city tha