The HARVEST Blog

Prior to launching Harvest, Shawn and I were in the thick of operating our web design and development business. During those years, one of our biggest inspirations was seeing how other businesses looked on the inside. The physical office space represented the modern day workshop. Seeing other people’s spaces helped us imagine the type of workspace we wanted to create. How companies divided up their floor, how teams sat together (or not), what they decorated their space with — those were all signals of what the business believed in.

Workspaces continue to inspire us as we build Harvest today. The office is where we spend a big portion of our waking hours, and we want to continue to create the best environment for our team. We still seize opportunities to visit startups and technology companies in NYC and wherever we travel. Seeing photos is one thing but to visit the physical space where ideas come together and speak with the people there — those opportunities are rare.

In 2010, with the momentum of the technology ecosystem rising in New York, we decided to bring that opportunity to a larger audience. What if we organized an “open house for technology companies” so more people can take part in the experience of seeing space and meeting the people behind them? We coined it Walkabout, after all, it’s a journey of discovery and NYC is a fine city for walking. That year, the first WalkaboutNYC event launched with 15 brave, companies opening their doors.

WalkaboutNYC is now in its third year and the event has grown up. Over 55 companies in New York City have committed to the spirit of community and to provide insightful experiences to those that visit. From NYC-rooted companies like Fog Creek Software, Tumblr, Skillshare, Voxel to new transplants like Facebook and Spotify, we couldn’t be more excited about the roster this year.

2012 also marks the year that Walkabout went international. On Friday, May 11th, the first WalkaboutSG took place in the technology capital of Asia, Singapore. It’s tremendously rewarding to see friends latch on and lead this effort in their communities. We are confident that many great things will come out of it for the respective communities.

Hat tip to Karen Schoellkopf, Harvest community manager and the fearless organizer of the event. Without her, Walkabout would not have come together.

On Friday, if you are in NYC, we hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to visit technology companies, see how they work, and meet some great people along the way.

Visit WalkaboutNYC

Assisting customers is an important part of virtually any business. At Harvest, Zendesk is our secret weapon for delivering extraordinary support to our customers. Zendesk lets us manage all of our incoming support tickets, and respond at record speed (our average response time hovers around 6 minutes!).

Many businesses, like ours, care about tracking time for various tasks throughout the day. Customer service is no exception. On the support front, these businesses may find it useful to track time on each support ticket and know exactly how much time was spent on each client. This is incredibly useful for making informed decisions about a team’s support resources.

We’ve built an integration with Zendesk for doing just that. Now you can track time from your help desk effortlessly, and understand where the time is going with Harvest for Zendesk.

In case you missed it from the video, here are the highlights:

• One-Click Time Tracking – Start a Harvest timer from your Zendesk ticket in seconds. Ticket numbers appear in your task notes for added context.
• Smart Project and Task Selection – Harvest for Zendesk matches your open ticket with its related project and task automatically. It’s the smarter, faster way to track time.
• Detailed Time Reporting – Simply open a ticket to understand total time spent in resolution. Make informed decisions with insight into how much time your support team logs for each client.

Learn more and get started by visiting our Harvest for Zendesk page. We hope this Harvest integration gives you better insight into your help desk. As always, feel free to reach out to us with any feedback!

We’re currently navigating through the maze of acquiring a larger office space in Manhattan as we’ve outgrown our current headquarters. One of the interesting things we’ve found during this process is that the owners of large buildings will sometimes want to see our current office to get a feel for who we are. They want to know what kind of tenant they are about to offer a lease to.

We recently had one such office visit by a prospective landlord. After seeing how we’ve built out our current office and meeting some of our people, she became curious about the type of business we operated. While we can throw around terms like web software and SaaS all day long in our community, the reality is that to most people, what we do here is a foreign concept to them.

I took her through our business, showing her how Harvest is used and what types of customers we have. After getting a grasp of what we did, she looked around the room, eyeing the team, and asked, “What’s everybody doing? Are they just monitoring the website?” After all, the product appears to be working, what else might we need to do? The answer: a lot. As any software business knows, the product itself is just half the work.

To see it from her non-technical point of view, it wasn’t an outrageous question at all. I thought briefly how I would best answer this. Then I began:

Everyone here is a craftsman. Whether our craft is through technology, design or words, every person here is a craftsman. Like devoted woodworkers, we believe the back side of a cabinet is deserving of as much attention as the front side. Being craftsmen, we use our hard-won experience to build a trusted set of tools (whether physical, software or tools of the mind) to solve problems in the best way possible. As a collective, we shape the product and ultimately the entire Harvest service.

Our team is comprised of people who believe in crafting beautiful code, sweating the details and pixels, and working hard to find the right words to express our ideas. At the end of each day, we want to take a step back and say, “that’s our best work yet.”

That’s what everybody is doing here. We’re craftsmen (and women).

Improvisation as a business strategy has gained more and more traction over the years. The improv theaters in every major city offer consulting and team building exercises. The last two conferences I attended began with an improv session.

The best idea we can borrow from the improvisation world is the concept of “YES, AND.” From “Bossypants” by Tina Fey:

As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.” What kind of way is that to live?

Spending your time disagreeing is often a slow, frustrating path to indecision. Even if your goal is to get to a different place than your colleague is currently occupying, it’s likely faster to get there together. This does not mean suppressing your ideas:

To me YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. The next rule is MAKE STATEMENTS. This is a positive way of saying “Don’t ask questions all the time.” In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles.

YES, AND is a powerful way to work as a team. You will come to a discussion with your own ideas. Make statements, but don’t let your ideas drown out the ideas of those around you.

Listen, consider, adjust. Together.

Since the beginning of this year, we have been working on an ambitious project to re-think and re-imagine the most critical part of Harvest: the timesheet. We’re close to having something to show you. The first piece that will be ready is the new mobile view, which you can now sign up for beta testing.

Overhauling Six Years of Technology

The Harvest timesheet you use today went through a redesign over two years ago. The code is about six years old (as old as our business), improved and patched up over the years. This time we are building a completely new timesheet from scratch.

There aren’t any major problems with the timesheet today. In fact, the most common feedback we hear from our customers is that they love Harvest’s simple and beautiful design. But we’re not satisfied with it. We, as designers and developers, have evolved over the years, so has the web as a platform, and its technology. We are not improving the timesheet just to make it new. We believe we can create an even simpler and faster experience.

Why Mobile?

For the new timesheet, we decided to start mobile. To us, it’s also the most interesting platform to design against: with its small screen and natural restrictions, we are forced to be more disciplined with what we can show and do on screen. We also believe that timesheet should be mobile; it’s an activity that should not be chained to your desktop, and the information should be simple, succinct and clear, at a glance, on a tiny screen.

Mobile is the least intrusive way to experiment with a new technology without affecting our customers. We’re using a radically different way of building the new mobile timesheet (based on Backbone.js) – Dee, our main developer for the new timesheet, will write a more in-depth article about how the new timesheet is built. There is a lot going on behind the timesheet’s deceptively simple user interface. The goal here is to make it super fast and responsive (by that, I don’t mean being responsive with the layout, but responsive in terms of feedback to the users).

Looking Ahead

The plan is to launch the new mobile beta, to test out the new design and technology. Our hope is that once you start using it, you won’t really notice the difference. It should be smooth and mostly familiar. The changes are subtle: lighter, simpler, clearer, with a couple of tweaks to make time entry even faster. The big changes are all happening behind the scenes. We will be writing a few blog posts to share with you what we did and learned.

We are excited about this project and cannot wait to share it with you.

We quietly launched the new WalkaboutNYC site this week. This will be our third year hosting this technology company walking tour. This time there’s going to be a RSVP system for you to plan a walking schedule (coming soon). A huge thank-you to our Walkabout team: Karen, Naama, Kim and Joschka for their good work!

This past week, we refined a project that will be open for beta sign-up this coming week. T.J. published a blog post about the lessons from our recent upgrade to Ruby 1.9.3 and it’s making the rounds in the Ruby community.

Links from the past week, on Co-op:

• This Ruby Certification looks totally lagit.
• Our good friend, Saha, launched his new project, CollabFinder this week!
• I haven’t read it yet, but Patrick said this is a must-read: Forest Service may blow up frozen cows in cabin.
• Some of us parents at Harvest thoroughly enjoyed this: Planet Earth – Narrated by Kids.
• We’re not sure what to make of these new Siri commericials with celebrities.
• And: animated gif of the week.

There you have it. Hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and see you soon!

Things got done this week: Barry and T.J. pushed through an important system update; Warwick doubled the memory for our primary database servers; Dee, Patrick, Matthew and Samara made great progress for a project that will launch for beta soon; Kim and Joschka are making the final push for WalkaboutNYC‘s new site (coming this week!). On top of all that, our new junior devs are getting started on an important integration. Phew…

Discussed this week on Co-op:

• Warwick urges us to take 15 minutes to watch this fascinating video about Caine’s Arcade.
• Our latest project requires testing on several platforms. I count six.
• Do you like cats?
• Doug Fales talks about his first program on Tech Time: drawing a clown face on a 40×80 grid using AppleSoft BASIC.
• Google as a BBS, built with Javascript, HTML and CSS. (via Jon)
• “Potholes fill themselves when Cory Booker walks by. #CoryBookerStories” Our new, favorite Twitter meme, after Mayor Booker’s heroic act of rescuing a woman from fire. (via Patrick)
• Our Rdio playlist this week: “The Movies“.
• We can’t decide which should be the animated gif of the week: Tyson vs Evan.

There you have it. Here’s to a fun and fruitful week ahead. See you soon!

This was an unusual week. On Wednesday we had a film crew over at Harvest HQ all morning. We were filmed for a video customer story for Voxel, the awesome hosting company Harvest depends on. Work went on as usual, except that we had cameras following us as if we’re in a reality TV show.

Our product team made great progress this week: an important system security update will be deployed this upcoming Wednesday, the Backbone.js project I mentioned last week is going strong (hope to have a beta release this month), and we’re about to begin an exciting integration, which you’ll be hearing soon.

A week’s worth of random findings, from our Co-op stream:

• Naama found this recent interview with John Pavlus on The Setup, and he said, “I rely on an extremely well-designed webapp called Harvest for my freelance backoffice tasks like time-tracking and invoicing… Harvest is a lifesaver, well worth the small monthly fee.” Thanks for the shout-out, John!
• What was your first program? Barry is too old to remember but he had a TI-99/4A.
• Over half a million Macs infected by a virus? This got our in-house security expert, Doug, all kinds of excited.
• A handy chart of German articles from Joschka.
• A way to view source on iPhone or iPad. We’re working on a project for the touch devices right now, and this handy bookmarklet is going to be useful.
• Not sure why Lettini would think that any Harvester would need it, but he reminded us that last Friday was get-out-of-jail-free-day in Brooklyn.
• Harvest FriTunes #72: Interjections! Featuring James Brown, Lionel Richie, The Long Winters (!), and Usher (twice).
• A here’s a moment of Zen: (happy) dots, by Evan, who also provided us with the animated gif of the week.

Friday was an important day for Jonathan Lane, who checks into Harvest each day from Mayne Island, BC, Canada (if you plan to visit, he asks that you first watch this video). Jon was a happy Harvest customer, and joined our support team one year ago. These days he leads up the Fireteam and diagnose potential bugs reported by our customers. We’re lucky to have the amazing Jon on our team!

There you have it. Hope your coming week is smooth, interesting and productive. See you soon.

A couple of days ago I read this article about the newly designed #taxioftomorrow that will start appearing on New York streets in 2013. There were a lot of interesting tidbits in the article, among them, the yellow color is going to be brighter, the floor mats will be made from recycled materials, and the sound of the honk is changing. But what really struck me was the story of how Nissan, an automotive manufacturing company nearing its 80th year of operations had to learn how to behave like an agency.

For the Nissan designers every decision needed to be vetted internally and then approved by the client. Some decisions that Nissan thought would be easy approvals became lengthy discussions. One such decision was the partition between driver and rider. Wanting to embrace technology, the Nissan team pitched the idea of an intercom system. David Yassky, NYC Taxi Commissioner, didn’t approve. In addition to worrying about sound quality, Yassky shared a widely held belief by Drivers – connecting with riders generally earns them a better tip.

In my previous life at a large corporation I was always on the client side of agency interactions. Giving creative feedback was never easy, I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. However, as a brand manager I knew my job was as an advocate for the customer and the company. If my feedback was focused on customer insights, it was generally well received and aided in the creative process. The story about the divider reminded me of this. It’s a great example of a client and an agency working well together. Yassky didn’t tell Nissan that he didn’t like the closed divider, he told them about his customers’ needs. In this case the drivers’ need to make human contact.

For an old product company and a bunch of city politicians, this article portrays a relatively smooth process. I can’t wait to ride in the result!

RightSignature is a service that allows your clients to physically sign off on documents they receive by email.  Using RightSignature in combination with Harvest, your customers will be able to sign off on and approve invoices directly through their web browser, signing their signature with their mouse or finger (on an iPhone or iPad).  Here’s how it works:

“We’re thrilled to announce the RightSignature-Harvest integration,” says Daryl Bernstein, RightSignature CEO, “This is a perfect example of the power of cloud software. Now businesses everywhere can use these two elegant web applications together to track time, create invoices, and send documents for signature … all online with a few clicks.”

The new RightSignature-Harvest integration enables you to send contracts, forms, and estimates to your Harvest contacts for legally-binding signature online. While preparing a document or reusable template for sending, you begin typing a party’s name, and RightSignature automatically displays possible contact matches from your Harvest account.

Additionally, you can send Harvest invoices for signature from inside RightSignature. Simply click the Harvest button on the Send screen to access a listing of your Harvest invoices.  Head over to RightSignature and sign up for an account to test out this new integration today!