3,233 signups a week, huh?

Let's say they hit that number every week, minus one for the holidays. And let's say 2% become paying customers.

I'm not going to factor in churn … but at that rate, they're adding nearly $4MM in revenue every year.

Not too bad.

Thanks for sharing that article. It's impressive—and unsurprising at this point given their track record, I suppose—to see how much thought they've invested in getting the working "organism" right: the stress put on scoping, the organic format of team-building and execution, the flex time in between that allows for reflection and following up ideas found in the working cycle.

I've found that the sprint-rest-sprint nature of agency work addresses some of the fatigue that embedded product teams often face; cool to see Basecamp injecting a similar break in to their process.

In addition to allowing time to poke at ideas stumbled upon during the last work cycle (which is often the most fruitful time), it ensures no time wasted context-switching between execution and strategic mid-cycle.

Well, that process sounds fascinating! From the feedback loop perspective, it's hard to argue against creating something real and validating it immediately (assuming you have good processes for assessing feedback, and it doesn't just sink promising things immediately).

Jaime, Is there a writeup you can point me to about their process?

Basecamp leadership are famous for heavily weighting sustainability and quality over size, and for promoting a narrative that success doesn't always have to look hockey-stick … so I'm guessing from their perspective, this reflects their values/story.

That's not quite fair: the author didn't recommend that, and was instead attempting to illustrate the challenge of a system where there are multiple possible—and allowed—ways of achieving the same perceived end result.

I still can't tell if icons8 is serious, or just a very well-funded troll.

Zzzzz

This is they way I've felt. There's a lot of hype on here about Figma, but I'm hard pressed to find serious design teams (read: large, tech titans) that aren't heavily—if not near exclusively—on Sketch.

That being said, having tried Figma after a couple of these responses, I will say there are some things that I'm really liking, but also a few big gaps. Hard to say yet if they hype is warranted. we'll see how it pans out …

Thank you for the excellent answer.

I like the idea of a tool that's more integrated—having to involve other parties for more robust prototyping or discussion/collaboration is cumbersome at best.

I've decided to take the workflow for a spin on the design of a new component we need that has a number of states and interactions. So far I'm very happy with the prototyping and collaboration, while the jury is still out on speed of workflow (for me, that's a heavy reliance on data, layer styles, and components-within-components).

I appreciate the nudge.

Everyone keeps saying that Sketch is playing catch up. As someone who tried Figma ages ago, could you explain to me how its now better than Sketch?