By Jason Fried · world.hey.com · @jasonfried on X · LinkedIn
Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, answers a common question: why build something brand new instead of adding it to an existing product? He argues that a fresh start gives teams the freedom to explore new technology and design approaches. Extending a large, established system pulls new work back toward existing decisions, so teams conform rather than explore. Even when a new project fails, the individual pieces, experiments, and executions discovered along the way can flow back into existing products or inform future work. For product leaders, the essay is a short case for protecting space for genuine novelty.
01Key takeaways
- Starting fresh gives you latitude to explore new technology and design approaches that an existing system might block.
- Large existing systems exert a gravitational pull that tends to bend new ideas back toward current patterns.
- Treat new bets as worth pursuing even if they may fail, because they generate interesting discoveries.
- Capture reusable elements and explorations from failed efforts, since they can improve other products later.
- Building something new starts with thinking differently, not just with starting a new project.
02Key sections
- The question of building new
- Teams are often asked why they don't simply add a new idea to an existing product. The essay frames the answer around the freedom a clean start provides.
- Why grafting onto existing systems limits you
- Established systems carry the weight of past decisions, which takes so much energy to escape that new work tends to drift back toward what already exists.
- Being wrong is still valuable
- New efforts may fail, but they are always interesting, and the learnings from the attempt are worth the risk.
- Lessons that carry back and forward
- Even failed new projects leave behind individual elements and executions that can be reused in current products or future bets.
- Thinking something new
- The essay concludes that building something new is fundamentally a matter of mindset, not just a matter of starting a new codebase.
03From the post
“When we make something new, people often ask "why don't you just add that to Basecamp?" There are a number of reasons, depending on what it is. But, broadly, making something brand new gives you latitude (and attitude) to explore new tech and design approaches. It's the opposite of grafting something on to a heavier, larger system that already exists.…”
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.