This year 67 Bricks turns fifteen, a milestone which we think gives us good reason to sit back and reflect on our journey so far. It’s always enlightening to take stock of how far you’ve come, and we know many people in the publishing industry (as well as our own colleagues!) will remember just how different the landscape was fifteen years ago.
Back then, software development and project planning were dominated by the waterfall model. This approach, first described in the 1950s, forced development into a linear process – each stage must be completed before you move on to the next, and there are no overlapping stages. Many IT projects went over budget and did not deliver on the expected business benefits, in part due to the lack of flexibility in this approach. Technology was in the complicated position of being both extremely important and also difficult to deal with. Technology teams were considered separate or ancillary to the business, and most reported to the finance director, where they were seen as a cost to be managed as opposed to a skill to be developed throughout the company. There was a sense of great expectation that technology could bring about real change in the way information companies and publishers would deliver value for their customers, but a gap in the expertise on exactly how to get to that point.
Waterfall model diagram ‘Managing the Development of Large Software Systems’, W. Royce, 1970
Through the first phase of transformation to an online world – moving assets and models online – but there had been little strategy behind how best to use this new environment, or whether these existing practices were even appropriate to continue within an online space. Product management and user experience were both yet to become real roles, and most companies had little understanding of how their users interacted with their services, or what ‘good’ would look like. All in all, a time of great challenges but even bigger opportunities for those companies willing to invest in their futures.
We saw a space for us to do software development ‘properly’ – bringing business benefits to our customers as well as value to their end users. The key for us was building a business that was focused on good software development practices, regardless of the ask from a client, that delivered consistent and positive results. Our view was that if you did the ‘right thing’ every time you would be rewarded with loyal, happy customers and industry respect and recognition. So that’s what we set about building, slowly working with more and more complex client requirements, building a team by focusing on hiring excellent people who we could trust to deliver the right things for our clients, and broadening our expertise within publishing as we grew in size and confidence. We also adopted agile methodology, giving us the flexibility to develop software in a way that would truly deliver on our client’s goals without committing them to a defined solution too early in the process.
Along the way, there were a number of great ‘moments’ that really stood out to us as the company developed; winning our first few clients was obviously exciting, hiring our first additional member of staff (Daniel Rendall – still with us today!), renting our first office space… all of these were significant moments for us and 67 Bricks. We didn’t always get it right, and in fact, getting some negative feedback from one of our closest clients at one point was in its own way an important, if painful, moment. It gave us the opportunity to practice what we’ve preached for so long – to accept feedback, take action if you can, and never shy away from a customer offering you their insight and experience, however uncomfortable. As a ‘critical friend’ to many of our clients, we can now be even more confident that we can support them through difficult discussions.
We’ve learned an awful lot over the last fifteen years. One important decision we made was to drop our ambition to be a product company. For a while we developed some off-the-shelf solutions to common problems our clients were encountering. However, this didn’t fit culturally with our mission to always build the right thing for each situation, and so we realised we needed to step away from building products and focus on providing tailored solutions. This takes into account not only the end-users’ requirements but also the teams we are working with – what are we leaving them to manage, can we/they iterate again in the future, are we creating solutions that can grow over time? This has been essential to our success.
Thinking about how we run our company in terms of internal culture, our biggest learning has been that people matter more than anything else. Time and again we have seen that having faith in our teams to do the right things, and providing them with an environment where they have the space and confidence to do so, is the most effective way to deliver excellence.
Looking to today, of course handing over the day-to-day running of the company to the new management team, led by Jennifer Schivas, has been a huge change for us both. We’ve nurtured the company through its first fifteen years, but the time has come to see the company enter its next phase with new leadership. We’re so proud of everything we have all already achieved together, and cannot wait to see what the next fifteen years bring for 67 Bricks.
Sam Herbert and Inigo Surguy
