We like to think from first principles and are quite resistant to using ready-made solutions unless we deeply understand the rationale. That has always been what makes balena special and why the team is so proud of our culture.
The friction
This spirit, while exciting and fulfilling, comes with its trade-offs. In the case of project management, we never used a well-defined and structured process. When we were a smaller startup, staying aligned was straightforward, with everyone kept in the loop on what needed to be done. However, as we grew, this became harder and harder, and teams started creating silos. New joiners needed more than a year to get comfortable with our way of working. Despite people having the freedom to make a significant impact, we realized we weren’t setting the team up for success, not because of a lack of transparency, but because of a lack of consistency and a lack of guardrails.
We naively and expensively tried to solve that problem (along with our team communication in general) by building our own communication system that could do anything and everything: facilitate customer support, integrate all external tools like GitHub, offer team chat, manage projects, collect patterns, etc. We dedicated a significant portion of our time and resources to it, but despite our efforts, this tool ended up creating more problems than it solved.
Since Chris, Phil, and I stepped into leadership and formed the office of CEOs, we have been very serious about the clarity of our system. We made the tough decision to abandon the custom internal communication tool in favor of established solutions that weren’t tailor-made but were maintained and improved by someone else. Fibery was the tool of choice as it offered flexibility and ease of integrating our workflow, solving that part of our problem.
Yet, we were still missing a company tempo, as Phil put it. Serendipitously, we stumbled upon Basecamp’s ShapeUp, a straightforward framework that helps people portion their work and make bets on the most important thing to focus on next. Reading through the book felt particularly odd, as if it were written by one of us. The method offered a seamless way to enhance what we were already doing, aligning perfectly with our principles without introducing peculiar elements.
Intentional Work Framework
Inspired by this framework, we wasted no time in starting to put together an MVP of our own version, which we now call the Intentional Work Framework. While we were doing that, some engineers began testing it on Etcher, which had needed some attention for a while. After finishing the first ‘Cycle’, we introduced the logic to the team and encouraged people to join.
The logic is straightforward: Anything that needs to be done should be put in a pitch, stating the problem it solves, the desired outcome, and why it needs to be done right now. We then pitch our ideas and try to make the most impactful bets on what to focus on in the coming cycle. This process encourages people to make a contract with themselves and their team about the problem they are focusing on and how their time will be spent. This guardrail is designed to allow people to self-organize, help them stay focused, and deliver at a steady pace.
The loop starts with the Betting Table week, where people pitch their documents in an all-hands call. Projects can either be ‘Shaping’ – turning vague ideas into specifications – or ‘Building’ – turning shaped ideas into shipped products. To sort our pitches, we rate them by importance, considering how much we can afford to postpone them and what is their impact on our goals. This process is not about voting but rather operates as an idea meritocracy. Once the pitches are sorted, we begin distributing our resources from the most to the least important.
When the cycle begins, teams have 6 weeks to complete their projects, an optimal period for meaningful work beyond just quick fixes. Splitting work into 6-week chunks is tricky, and most of us ended up overpromising and under-delivering in the first few cycles. Our goal is to start by aiming for 1-2 days of intentional work per week and improve from there over time.
At the end of the cycle, there is a cool down week. The teams need to make an intentional decision regarding their work. The goal is to have an MVP we can ship, but if we don’t, individuals need to decide if they are willing to invest another cycle in that project or set it aside and move on to something else. Keeping each other accountable to our principles is key at balena – during the cool down, we host some all-hands calls to review our progress and learn from each other so we can make better bets for the next cycle.
More than a project management tool
The beauty of the system extends even further. We’ve realized that this logic can be applied to almost any decision-making process. It empowers individuals to make their own decisions within defined guardrails. For instance, if someone wants to attend a work-related event, there’s no need to request budget and permission in the traditional sense. Instead, you can present your reasoning, make a bet, and document your outcomes so both you and the team can learn and improve for the future. This applies whether you’re considering renewing your hardware, engaging with an external firm, or any other decision. Our trust isn’t in people making the right bet every time, but in their continuous effort to make bets until they find the right answer.
Summary
Wrapping up, we’ve only been through a few cycles, yet the impact is already significant. Our goal is for every action to be intentional, and this framework guides people to set priorities, align with our vision, and contribute toward it, enabling everyone to understand what we’re doing and why. This shift has helped us bolster our commitment of intentionality, autonomy, and transparency, while removing a lot of the friction we experienced in the past.
Our strategy includes dedicating roughly 30% of our bets to moonshots – high-risk, high-return ideas that can bring a step change – while the remainder aim at steady, incremental improvements in usability, reliability, and security. Our next challenge? We’re focusing on coming up with ways to curate our bets to address those high level strategies. More to come…
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