Beta Acid

We love building things.

If you’ve ever met me or heard me talk about why I started Beta Acid you’ve likely heard me say that I love building cool shit. It's why I do this job and it's a passion everyone on our team shares. Most of us have been doing it for a long time and we’ve gotten pretty good at it.

So when people ask me if we're an Agile team, I get excited. Not because I think Agile is great, but because I think it's mostly a waste of time. Something that is used by managers to make them feel like they are in control, oblivious to the fact that most of the team finds the process tedious, the ceremonies unproductive, and the meetings fatiguing.

So, no, we are not an Agile team. But we do some Agile-ish things.

It’s important to understand that Beta Acid is not a product company; we are a software delivery company. This means that we don’t adhere to many of the traditional tenets that many other software companies do. Although there are plenty of dreamers on our team, and we’re happy to help you dream, ultimately we are hired to get shit done.

So what is it like to build software with the team at Beta Acid?

Principles

There is a core set of values that drive what we do. Most of these are principles that come from our extensive experience building products in the startup world; a cutthroat place where only those who Get Shit Done survive.

• Always Be Delivering – everything we do should be in support of bringing a project closer to completion.
• Be Fast, Keep Focused, Stay Flexible – get things in front of customers, users, or clients as quickly as possible and be ready to iterate as priorities change.
• Good is Better than Perfect – perfection is a distraction that gets in the way of getting good things done.
• Communicate Clearly – proactively ensure that everyone is clear on status, goals, and priorities.
• Better Together – every person on the team is there for a reason and our outcomes will always be better when we work together.

Adherence to these principles leads to greater productivity and increased efficiency, and has an awesome side effect of people being happier and more fulfilled with their work (or at least that's true for our team). No one on our team complains about having too many meetings or not having time to get work done.

Method

As you'd expect, you won’t find hardcore Agile Advocates or Scrum Masters on our team. Instead, we pull in processes that work for us from a variety of existing frameworks (Agile, RUP, Spiral, Waterfall, etc.) and tweak them to suit our needs. Every project we work on has different needs and every team we work with has different communication styles, so we focus on being adaptable to these needs while maintaining a few key tenets.

Our workflow for a new project contains four phases:

• Discover – we dig in to understand a project’s goals and scope.
• Design – we extrapolate from our initial discovery to design and architect the solution.
• Develop – we build and test through an iterative process that is receptive to changing priorities while ever marching towards completion.
• Deploy – we create infrastructure and operational processes for launching products in the market.

Generally, we focus on bringing net new software products from conception to delivery and our methodology reflects that. We approach improving and maintaining existing products in a different way and would be more likely to take a traditional approach for those projects.

Team

Arguably, the factor that will contribute most to the successful delivery of a product is the team that is responsible for building it.

Our product is our people and our people are awesome. We’ve assembled a team of doers (and dreamers) who are incredibly experienced in their fields. There is no need for egos or politics when everyone you work with is equally talented, thoughtful, mature, and kind.

We are all entrepreneurs, creatives, engineers, organizers, doers, and dreamers that work together to get shit done.

Outcome

Through this lens, we are able to deliver an outstanding product, effectively and efficiently, and have fun doing it. Instead of boxing ourselves into a prescribed framework, we pick and choose the best of what works for us and the teams we work with.

Let's build some cool shit together!