Increasing Capacity by 37signals

Takeaways

📘 You don’t need more people to do more work. Most teams slow down as they grow. Speed and capacity come from clarity, cohesion, and trust—not headcount. A smaller, sharper team gets more done with less.

📘 37signals runs 4 SaaS products with 60 people. Not long ago, they were at 80, and everything moved slower. Managing a larger team created more overhead, more layers, more drag. Back at 60, they're shipping more than ever. Two new products are in the works. Basecamp and HEY continue to improve every six weeks. Open source projects and ONCE products tick along in the background.

📘 The secret? Teams of two or three. A stable, experienced group that knows how to work together. Discipline over chaos. Hiring rarely, but deliberately. A new designer is joining now—not because they’re falling behind, but because they’re planning ahead. One person leaving shouldn’t stall the entire product line.

📘 Bloat doesn’t boost capacity. The right 60 is worth more than the wrong 80. Great teams feel light. They stretch. They switch in and out. They carry each other without burning out.

📘 Not every project starts with a business case—HEY started as a CRM rewrite. What matters is shipping something real. Releasing is non-negotiable. Every product they explore, they launch. Ideas aren’t for filing cabinets. They’re for customers.

📘 Productivity lives in constraints. Ambition lives in curiosity. The balance between both is where great work gets done.

Top Quotes

💬 I don’t actually think that most companies work that well between 80 to probably 110 or 120. You either need to be smaller or you need to be bigger.

💬 You go faster occasionally when you let people go who are kind of holding up the group.

💬 When you just have, even just on the programming side alone, a handful of people, but they’re really good, they’ve been here for a long time, they know each other really well, they’re highly experienced, it is unbelievable how productive and how effective they can be.

💬 Sometimes we just have an itch, we want to make something new. Sometimes we have an idea that we can’t get rid of. Sometimes there’s something we want that we don’t have.

💬 We’re building this thing and actually it makes me a little bit more inspired to make it even better and better and better, to make it irresistible in a sense where I want to get to the place where we’re using this, where we feel like, what was it like before that?

💬 If we’re not shipping, this isn’t meaningful. We’re throwing away. I fucking hate throwing things away. I know of nothing worse than to look back and I just wasted my time.

💬 I can waste my time if it’s in service of becoming wiser, if it’s in the service of developing a better product. I cannot waste my time just exploring willy-nilly rainbows, and then they go into trash.

Podcast link: Increasing Capacity