There has been plenty written recently on distributed teams. A couple of weeks ago @dhh wrote a post on the 37signals blog that generated an enormous amount of discussion. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about since I joined Harvest because I happen to think we run our distributed team really well.

A huge part of Harvest’s successful distributed team is our use of Co-op, a free online collaboration tool built by the Harvest team. Co-op is a private status update stream that is seamlessly integrated with Harvest (naturally!). The original intent was to create a water cooler that was less invasive than group chat. However it has become absolutely vital to the operations of this business as well as to the culture.

The reason Co-op works is that it enables one-to-many communication in addition to one-to-one communication. As a marketer, I shouldn’t be surprised that communication should vary if speaking to many people versus one person. It just never occurred to me that successful distributed teams need tools that enable multiple types of communications. It’s quite obvious now.

I’ll admit, when I first got here I was a bit overwhelmed by Co-op – it just seemed like one more continuous stream of chatter that I needed to pay attention to. I have now come to love it. In addition to keeping me up to date on what everyone is working on it has helped me build relationships with my co-workers both in and out of New York. Personalities come through in Co-op in a way that they don’t on email. It has helped create and maintain the sense of culture in the office.

If you have a distributed team, or even if you don’t, I recommend you check it out here.

In 2011, we made over 800 updates to Harvest. We had countless conversations with our customers, added new features, refined old features and fixed issues. The constant evolution is a part of who we are as a cloud-based software company. A new update can be deployed to our customers in over 100 countries in an instant and we love that.

It’s About the Team

Behind the scenes, we’ve focused on growing our team. By December of 2011, we added 8 brilliant Harvesters to round out the team at 19. We’ve learned new ways to work together, whether it’s creating Delta Force teams for support, thinking through feature requests, or getting face time with our customers.

With every new team member we add to Harvest, we’re adding one more mind that’s completely focused on making the Harvest experience better for our customers. Updates are done faster, problems are solved more efficiently and our customer service gets even better (send our support team an email during business hours and you’ll hear back from us within 15 minutes).

It’s been a tremendously educational year for us as a team. If you’d like to learn with us, we’re hiring. :)

Turning 5 Years Old

2011 also marked the 5th year we’re in business as Harvest. Harvest was first created to meet the time tracking needs that Shawn and I had during our days as a design studio.

Since the beginning, we’ve taken the approach of building things one step at a time. At first, it was out of necessity of being bootstrapped, but later, it was because we wanted to keep things simple. Year after year, more and more people adopted Harvest to power their businesses. In the process, we’re honored to have picked up the best kind of funding possible for a company: paying customers. Without the distractions of fundraising, we are free to focus on just making Harvest better.

We couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing community and customers, so when we turned 5 in April, we launched our Giving Back program. As our users tracked time, we allocated donations towards important causes addressed by Doctors Without Borders, Room to Read and charity: water.

The first 5 years was just the beginning.

A Better Harvest

Our business philosophy is simple: create a great product and tell people about it. There are no gimmicks and no shortcuts. We simply love creating something useful and we’re happiest when our customers tell us how we’ve saved them time and hassle.

Our team proudly stands behind what Harvest offers and we’ve prepared a little something to look back on the major updates last year: Harvest 2011 Year In Review.

Thank you for a great 2011. We can’t wait to share the goodness with you in 2012.

It’s a new year! We hope that everybody had a great holiday season and that you’re as excited about 2012 as we are! We’ve got some great things planned for the coming year!

After returning from a short break, we’ve been focussed on catching up with any questions and bugs that were reported to us. Naama had an epiphany while on holidays, and put out the rallying cry to Demand Better!  The billing overhaul went very smoothly and we’ve been tweaking a few odds and ends on that front.  We discovered a minor bug with our iOS app when the New Year hit (with Expenses), and a new version has been sent to Apple for approval. We also launched a new Twitter Contest for the month of January – Time Saving Tuesdays where you can tweet your best productivity tips for a chance to win some great prizes.

It hasn’t been all business around the office though, we have had some great chats on Co-op:

• Patrick has relocated to Texas for the next few weeks, despite the lack (so far) of winter weather in New York.
• Shawn made a quick trip back to New York over the holidays to welcome a new member to his family (and ours).  Welcome Nico! Even though Shawn is off spending some time with little Nico, he’s still watching over us at Harvest HQ. (thanks Lettini and PillowMob)
• Sri has suggested that maybe all of this talk of productivity is overrated. In the near future, we’ll do all of our goofing off while hidden by a time cloak.
• Warwick has been busy digging up some wonderful delicacies for us to sample at the next Harvest Summit.  I’m going to try out Casu Marzu if Warwick tries some Hákarl (I’ll report back if I survive the experience).
• It’s Doug’s birthday today!  Happy birthday Doug!

Happy New Year everyone!

I’m filling in for Shawn on this week’s edition of the Harvest Playback, and I’m excited to let you know what we’ve been up to.

Here’s a rundown of what we accomplished this past week: we completed and deployed a major billing overhaul (and Barry even made a special Rdio playlist dedicated to it), we launched an updated Android app with improved syncing, and we came up with a plan to keep you all customer supported over the holidays.

Other things on our brains, as evidenced by our link swapping in Co-op:

• It was TJ’s birthday Wednesday, and the whole Harvest crew pitched in to make him a special website to help him launch his “side business.” We knew he had discovered it when he posted the link in Co-op.
• There was some love for a Kickstarter iPhone dock and some drooling over the new Grand Central Apple store.
• The news that Microsoft will be automatically updating IE for everyone was so popular it was double posted by both Shawn and Patrick.
• Weird links of the week: Naama found some amazing pictures of real people and their avatars, Warwick shared an interview with Lou Reed, and we all marveled at some strange Obama swag.
• The Harvest Wilco fans delighted in watching Jeff Tweedy do the Chicago weather (thanks Barry).
• Harvest loves music: Shawn shared a beautiful Neko Case cover, recorded in a stairwell, Matt found a great Led Zepplin cover by Trent Reznor and Karen O, and Christopher updated our Harvest Record club.
• On our Watercooler Tumblr: some nice looking watches from Ziiiro, and wisdom from Andy Warhol.

That wraps up another productive and fun week at Harvest. See you next week!

We’ll start this edition of Harvest Playback with our latest Rdio playlist (#57) – Soundtrack to the Harvest Holiday Party ’11. Thank you to all the customers, colleagues and friends who came to our party this Wednesday!

In between bits of holiday cheer, here’s a rundown of what we accomplished this past week: launched a more flexible and powerful permissions system, prepared for a major billing overhaul this weekend, and wrapped up development on the Harvest Andriod app for release next week. We also kept it interesting on Co-op, with a few select topics:

• True story: Danny, T.J. and I saw Woz walking past us on Lafayette St. We thought it was him, but we weren’t sure. If we had done what we should’ve done, you’d see a picture of us, with Woz, for this Playback edition (he was in New York for the Gizmodo Gallery Opening Party).
• Facebook bought Gowalla and Github acquired Ordered List. Wow, maybe we’re going about our hiring the wrong way?
• Patrick is sad about Buehrle heading to Miami, Christopher elated about Pujols leaving the Cardinals, and we’re all confused about the whole CP3 mess.
• Some of our folks are starting a “Leave TextMate (for MacVim?) campaign for 2012″.
• Be prepared to waste some precious time drawing stick figures. You can blame Scott for that.
• We’re tickled (and a little frightened) by Mint’s 404 page.
• From our very own hipster, T.J.: Hipster Ipsum, “artisanal filler text”.
• Scott Weiland’s Winter Wonderland has changed Christopher’s mind about Christmas music, to which Barry responded: Bing + Bowie. Meanwhile, Samara is keeping herself happy with A Charlie Brown Christmas. What?
• “They was doing mashups before mashups even existed,” Ice Cube on the Eames. Here are the videos and interview on NY Times. Thanks, Patrick.
• You might’ve heard: fly.twitter.com and Nick Bilton’s take on the new design. We like what we see here.

Wednesday night we had our Harvest Holiday meetup, and we got to see many friends, family, customers, neighbors, and even one of our New Founders, Kristel, that swung by to Harvest HQ. It was great to meet and re-connect with so many people that rely on Harvest to run their businesses, and a wonderful chance for Harvest customers and the Harvest team to chat with each other. We had food to perk up the rain-soaked masses – savories and sweets were from two local establishments, Soho bakery Oro and Spanish specialty foods supplier Despana, and our drinks master Jae concocted large brews of mulled wine and warm spiced apple cider – yum.

Here are a few pictures of the festivities, and thanks for sharing such a great evening with us! Continue Reading …

Most of our team works out of our New York City office, but we also have team members across North America and Europe. Twice a year, we get everyone together for a week of in-person collaboration. For most of us, so much of our days are spent in the rhythm of work; and the majority of communication happens via email, Co-op, chat and Google hangouts. Our biannual Summits are designed to break up that rhythm and to reclaim the art of face time and in-person collaboration. We believe building great software means not only hiring the best people, but creating the best environment for collaboration. Beyond our products, we’re here to build a company.

During Summit, our team continues to work as usual, but with a few things mixed in. Here’s a sample of what we did at our last Summit in November:

Harvester Patrick Filler presenting a talk entitled “So You Think You Can Open Source”

Tech Talks
Curiosity is one of our core values. We believe not only in the constant pursuit of knowledge, but that it’s important to share what we’re learning with each other. While the talks are technical in nature, everyone in the company is invited to attend (we are a technology company afterall). Knowledge is shared not only for the sake of education but also to gather feedback. In our latest Tech Talks series, we discussed our new and improved approach to billing, an introduction to Chef and learnings from our open source project, Chosen.

Customer Visits
While every Harvester interacts with our customers via email or phone, there’s simply no substitute for visting our customers in person and getting to know what they do. We’re extremely customer focused as a company and we love learning from our customers. This year we visited three of them and you can read more about what we learned here.

♫ Don’t Stop Believin’ ♫
As you can gather from our careers page, we have a very musical group here at Harvest. It’s no coincidence that karaoke is one of our favorite pastimes. With each Summit, our team is bigger and our sessions are more epic.

As this year’s Summit wound down, we’re re-energized for the road ahead. More importantly, we’ve come away with a heightened understanding and appreciation for each other’s craft.

Want to join us on our next Summit? We are always looking for great minds to come along for the ride. :)

Just like that and we’re in the last month of 2011, and it hasn’t even snowed in NYC (except for that dusting in October).

This past week, we recovered from Thanksgiving, evolved the recent invoice update, updated the Harvest Forum, released a new Harvest Customers section (full write-up to follow soon!), and tied up all loose ends for a major release next week: a more flexible and powerful way to control user permissions.

Some things Harvesters talked about this week on Co-op:

• We’re having a little Holiday Meetup next week at Harvest HQ, and you’re all invited!
• Yesterday (Dec 1st) marks the second full year that our Sys Admin Extraordinaire, Warwick Poole, joined Harvest!
• Matthew Lettini’s feedback on Android: “taking a screenshot of an android phone is so convoluted that I’m just going to take a picture of it with my iPhone.” But we are making good progress on the latest Harvest Android App – coming soon!
• Kim linked to this neat little printer. We’re not sold on the usefulness but we’re impressed with the well-crafted site (hint: scroll down).
• Speaking of little: T.J. professed his love for Rails for the little things.
• While designing the case study for Cuban Council, Lettini noticed their interesting uniform policy.
• Fun fact: Did you know that the national flag of Nepal is the world’s only national flag that is non-quadrilateral in shape?
• In the news: Stalin’s daughter died, and that reminded Warwick of Nandos, a fast food chain in South Africa, has a history of awesome commercials which upset every group imaginable.
• Some articles on our reading list: Say No to SOPA, A Town in New York Creates Its Own Department Store, Open Source (Almost) Everything.
• On our Watercooler Tumblr: good reminder from Murakami and deconstructed time.

We’ve been taking a behind-the-scenes look at the way we handle customer service interactions at Harvest, and we’re currently looking a bit deeper at how we receive feature requests. Earlier this year, we launched Help 2.0, aimed to improve the way you find answers to your questions (and the response has been great).  We’ve also been hard at work on continually improving how we deal with bug reports — in terms of getting them reported and dealt with quickly.

Now we’re turning our focus to feature requests – we get dozens of them each week. These requests come in through various channels, like Twitter, over the phone, by email, and through the Harvest Forum. We take feature requests very seriously and strive to keep an accurate count of how many people have asked for something, what exactly their use case is, and how we can get in touch with them (so that we can ask further questions as we begin to develop a feature, and to let folks know when their request has been realized as a brand new, working feature).

Continue Reading …