Principles guiding SimpSocial’s products: Simplify your solutions to create better ones.
Complexity limits our capacity for fast movement. At SimpSocial, keeping things simple means taking care to deliver products to clients in the most direct manner possible.
We frequently make the mistake of presuming that a product’s power increases with complexity. At SimpSocial, we avoid complexity and keep things straightforward.
Keeping things simple results in solutions that are more intuitive for our clients and easier to design and maintain. Although it seems simple, mastering this ability takes a lot of practice, clarity, and cooperation between individuals.
We make sure we are concentrating on the appropriate issue and have a defined definition of success.
First, we check that the challenge we’re concentrating on is the proper one, and we define success precisely. This requires going back to the very beginning of every issue and solution, but in the end, it improves comprehension, speeds up operations, and enables you to learn more quickly by gathering feedback from customers as you go.
In the near term, this method allows you to deliver products to clients more quickly; yet, over time, it also makes it simpler to expand, grow, and enhance your solutions. When attempting to keep our procedures and solutions as straightforward as possible, we keep two things in mind.
We create a culture where simplicity is valued.
We encourage coworkers to question one another if they fall into the trap of overcomplicating a method because this notion is ingrained in our culture. The best way to learn and get better at simplification is through repetition.
“Creating a culture that supports simplification requires incorporating it into our everyday vocabulary.”
Making simplification part of our everyday vocabulary will make it easier for us to voice our concerns when problem descriptions or solutions become overly complex. It entails fostering an environment in which everyone feels free to offer and accept feedback and learn from it.
I’ve developed the practice of mentally stripping situations down to the bare essentials of what is happening and why, leading me to focus on the simplest, smallest remedy to gradually improve things. In addition, if you adopt this idea, it may permeate both your professional and personal lives.
We carefully consider the trade-offs we make.
In the SaaS sector, it’s typical to encounter conflict between the necessity to address enormous technical debt that slows down engineers and the desire to advance with the product.
At SimpSocial, we deliberately consider the tradeoffs we make, so we are aware from the moment we begin problem-solving that shipping to our clients will come before creating the “perfect” technical solution or utilizing the most recent programming language. This not only lessens the cognitive burden of making decisions, but it also makes us move more quickly because we are not continuously weighing choices.
“Our roadmaps regularly assess the health of our products, and we encourage engineers to follow the 20% rule.”
This does not imply that we neglect technical debt or lag behind in technological advancement. We urge developers to follow the 20% rule: wherever practical, spend 20% of execution time upgrading existing code or paying down technical debt as you go. Product health is continuously monitored in our roadmaps.
When necessary, we take on larger team initiatives to enhance our systems, and at the R&D level, we have entire core teams devoted to maintaining the effectiveness and state-of-the-art of our technical stack and infrastructure. Our ultimate objective is to use our current technologies to quickly and securely deliver consumer value.
Every circumstance benefits from the advice to “keep it simple”.
Our “keep it simple” guiding idea infuses everything—processes, technical solutions, and feedback—and is a crucial precept of a business that is fast expanding.
When a company has ten employees and everyone is operating in the same context, things can be simplified. However, try scaling that to a hundred and then a thousand. The challenges of meeting the special requirements of numerous distinct teams and product areas can have an impact on the entire business.
“Keeping it simple looks like consciously choosing to be a technically conservative company in all of our decisions,”
In the eyes of the SimpSocial Engineering team, keeping things simple means consciously deciding to run a technically conservative business. By doing this, we can better align our existing engineers and communicate expectations to potential hires.
Our whole R&D team depends on two monoliths; all new hires are trained in the same technologies, and every team uses the same codebase. This simplicity not only helps the product and our speed, but it also creates a climate where engineers may easily transition into other organizational effect areas, whether to advance their personal development or to hasten a project.
We can create excellent items quickly because of simplicity.
Recently, a brand-new feature called Resolution Bot Preview was released by our Automated Support team. While we often start by thinking broadly before narrowing our focus, this project had timing restrictions. Instead of asking ourselves, “How much time do we need to ship the cupcake?” we determined how many weeks we had, then came up with ideas on how to provide the most value to the customer in that time.
What happened? Customers were thrilled with the product, and 54% of them began using it within a month after we finished building it. Without keeping things straightforward, we would not have attained that milestone so quickly.
Collaboration enables us to strike a good balance and maintain our product’s overall simplicity.
The strong, collaborative ties between product, design, and engineering absolutely shine in these situations where even the most straightforward product designs aren’t always the most straightforward to implement. At SimpSocial, engineers are involved in every dialogue from the beginning and can shed light on how various design trajectories may affect technical effort and viability. Collaboration enables us to strike a balance and maintain our product’s overall simplicity.
As we grow, we’ll continue to give priority to simplification.
We are able to work quickly and provide high-quality products for our customers because we keep processes and solutions simple. In the end, it’s not the intricate feature integration that makes SimpSocial important to them; rather, it’s the seamless integration of all our basic capabilities that results in a complete end-to-end experience.
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