500 Weeks of Friday Ship

In November, 2012 I started as Director at a corporate strategy firm in lower Manhattan that was called Undercurrent. They were aptly named: quietly they were responsible for steering the high-level strategies of some of the world’s largest companies like General Electric, American Express, PepsiCo. Undercurrent was widely-known in the industry for having understood how the internet was changing marketing and communications, having pioneered what later became known as influencer marketing with the launch of the Ford Fiesta.

I learned a lot of good working habits at Undercurrent. One of the most impactful was the Friday Ship: every team at Undercurrent was expected to send work in progress to clients no matter how raw. Knowledge work is uncertain, and getting feedback early and often from our clients only helped produce a product they could use.

Parabol doesn’t have just one client. We serve hundreds of thousands of people. From Parabol’s founding that was only an ambition but I understood there was only upside and little downside to building the company in public.

Maintaining this habit hasn’t always been a joyful one. There were many, many weeks where writing the Friday Ship contended with other priorities, leaving for a weekend holiday, or feeling uncertain about what to write about. There is real benefit to feeling like there isn’t something to share: it’s a weekly check-up on if the business is focused on the most important things, or not.

Over the last decade we discovered many other unanticipated benefits of maintaining the ritual of writing the Friday Ship. Here are a few I’d like to share.

The number one signal that a hiring prospect makes a great candidate is if they have done their research on the company. I estimate fewer than 1 in 100 applicants took the time to research our company before an interview. If they found our Friday Ship and had insights to share about the goings on in the company it was a great sign they were the kind of person who was ready to dig in.

After making a hire, our recent Friday Ships do an amazing job of giving a new employee one thing they lack, context. We also made writing a Friday Ship the last item on a new member’s onboarding journey to give them an opportunity to practice habits we value here: being transparent, shipping work early, and having a wide scope on the business not just whatever the assumed scope of their job title.

Many investors are habituated to bullshit. Founders are incentivized to inflate metrics and only share good news. We wanted to be different, we wanted to be open, and above all, truthful.

Having an archive of our metrics and progress has been a huge boon to our ability to raise capital (even during economic down cycles). It has been especially helpful when analysts get into diligence and can use our public records to validate the veracity of what we share in a data room.

More valuable, however, is that our commitment to sharing the truth makes us truthful with ourselves. When you compile the metrics each week you’re touching them, evaluating them, and thinking about them. Metrics are only as valuable as the actions you take by measuring them.

After more than 10 years in business we’ve lived through some wild economic and world events. The Friday Ship has served as a touchstone for writing out thoughts and feelings and starting the process to make sense of what’s happening around us.

More valuable has been looking at our Friday Ship posts in aggregate. Every quarter they’ve become a valuable resource for compiling our board decks and investor letters. We’ve even compiled them into printed books for our employees as a durable reminder of the work they did together, intended to be looked back on in the decades to come (long after, we presume the world has shifted away from the internet and software as we know it now).

Friday Ship is an experiment. We’ve hardly changed the format since we began writing them. We intend to keep up this practice. Reaching the 500th post is a good milestone for us to begin to contemplate how this format and practice should change.

Thank you for following along!

A quieter week on the platform this week. July/August tend to be quieter months for us but these months are quieter than usual. Our path to broadening our product’s market appeal seems to be increasingly important. We’re glad we’ve got those plans well underway.

…continued making progress developing Team Health. While we didn’t quite ship our first cut of Team Health, we’ve already decided to continue its development in the next cycle. It is coming together nicely!

…worked on an implemented of Dark Mode (finally!) in Parabol. Here’s a sneak peak:

…enter cool down for this Shape Up cycle. This is a time for us to work on passion projects and explorations. Soon, we’ll begin planning the next cycle and get back to delivering our upcoming Team Health feature for organizations.