A few years ago, Peldi (our founder and CEO) had a humbling wake-up call that’s all too familiar for many of us: he was a decision-making bottleneck.
So with the leadership of Peldi, Natalie (our head of people, among other roles), and the full Balsamiq team, we went on a journey of thoughtful introspection, experimentation, and change.
In the last two newsletters, you read about some of our product changes. This month, we’re giving you an inside look into how we’ve been evolving our culture.
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Good decisions build good companies
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 From the very beginning, we’ve always believed that good decisions build good companies. But even though everyone at Balsamiq shares our values, Peldi was the main decision-maker for years.
When Balsamiq was much smaller, this was okay. When our business (and our team) grew, Peldi could no longer make every decision. He describes hitting a wall:
“You start to realize, whoa, the company relies on you way too much. We lasted a decade. How do we last another? What about two decades? Ten?”
Overly centralized decision-making hurts productivity, effectiveness, and culture. If we wanted to continue building a long-term company, everyone at Balsamiq needed to feel empowered to make good decisions.
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First, we experimented with injected turbulence
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 Shortly after this realization, Peldi wanted to see what he was really needed for. So, he injected turbulence and told everyone to pretend he wasn’t there—disappearing into the Slack channels and Confluence wiki notifications that make up our (mostly) async work streams.
Today, we know this experiment was harder on the team than anticipated. We didn’t have a structure in place to absorb the turbulence (we were a flat structure then), and the connection between our customer-facing teams and our product development teams weakened.
We hear lots of stories about founders and managers making drastic changes like this when they’re feeling stuck. And while we learned what broke, we wouldn’t recommend another team try this.
So we chose a different path to make ourselves less founder/CEO-heavy.
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How we started to make Balsamiq less founder/CEO-heavy
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 This journey is still in progress, but we started to fix some of the culture and structure gaps we learned about in the injected turbulence experiment:
- We listened to the team, making sure everyone was heard and seen as a partner in the process. Our head of people/head of culture, Natalie, facilitated conversations and organization.
- We revamped our company values. This informed every other decision we made.
- We created groups (some companies may call them teams or departments) to give everyone a “home base.”
- We introduced, trained, and continue to empower people managers. Our personal development budgets and company-built training help with this!
- We started to define roles better while keeping the teamwork and project flexibility our Balsamici love.
- We provided clear leadership opportunities for non-managers through project leads—people who have a specific set of responsibilities to move a project forward.
- We clarified our communication practices to document decision-making. Now, you can always see the history of a decision on one of our internal wiki pages!
- We hired different roles to help Peldi focus more on his role as CEO.
If you’re thinking about how you could do this on your own team, here’s a summary:
- Take a step back and listen to your team. Keep an open mind.
- Double down on your values.
- “Fire” yourself from some of the jobs you do by hiring or promoting people. Usually, these are the jobs you don’t like, or others can do better.
- Introduce team or group managers and empower them to make decisions.
- Define clear roles at the project level so that decision-making and accountability are clear.
- Communicate these changes. For example, we use a wiki (Confluence) with announcements on Slack, monthly all-hands, and monthly culture-focused meetings called Kaizen.
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A Balsamiq decision-making playbook
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It’s not too formal, but something I’ve found particularly interesting in my first three months at Balsamiq: we consider the facts over time, but we make decisions efficiently and with deep, deep care.
I asked Peldi to break down the steps of what he sees as the most common decision-making playbook used at Balsamiq. When sharing, Peldi mentioned that this comes from a blend of leadership and delegation training, as well as listening to feedback and suggestions from the whole team.
Here’s the playbook many of us follow, especially for big decisions:
- The project lead clarifies the problem you’re facing.
- Identify stakeholders. Make a list of all the people that should be involved in this decision. Not too many, not too few. Only you’ll know the magic number for your project.
- Ask those people if anyone else should be involved.
- Share your problem. Give people time to think about it and bring it to their teams if they choose. Usually, a few days (up to a week).
- Host a kickoff meeting that covers the pros and cons of the status quo—what we like about today and what we don’t. This aligns teams on what’s actually going on.
- During that meeting, come prepared with a list of your own but allow others to share theirs first. Take notes. If you assemble the right team, most things on your list will be brought up by them. Sometimes, your team will bring up things you hadn’t considered.
- Give people a week to consider what we discussed: problem definition. Encourage them to talk to their teams. This way, many voices can be involved, but you stay away from decisions by committee.
- The project lead turns the ideas into a possible roadmap and shares the roadmap with the group for feedback. If you’re aligned on the problem, usually aligning on the solution moves fairly quickly.
- Keep a record of each step. We take notes on a wiki page dedicated to each project, but you do you! We’ve found this helps us make many decisions asynchronously, which helps when you’re working remotely across timezones.
At Balsamiq, we try to spend 90% of our time defining the problem and 10% of our time identifying the solution. Then, it takes time to plan the solution—but the actual decision happens quickly when you know what the alternative is (status quo).
And because this framework uses project leads, anyone at Balsamiq who’s interested in leading a project can make a decision within our defined boundaries. Now that’s a 180-degree flip from when Peldi was the only one who could do this!
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The turning point in evolving decision-making was making the shift from founder/CEO solution-building to team solution-building.
We’ve learned a lot about what works (and perhaps more about what doesn’t). We’ve continued to experience extremely low employee churn (only 2 people have willingly left Balsamiq in 14 years). We have a growing customer base, profitability, and products that have stood the test of time.
And we’re still improving. We’re a work in progress for the long term, but now, with more ways to listen, support, and care for each other.
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Happy customer of the month
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 @balsamiq I use it not just for prototyping but to visualize any sketch in the idea phase.
If you want to translate your idea into a mockup rapidly, don't want to waste product resources & iterate fast, I can't recommend using this app enough. — Prateek Gaur
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Product news
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This month’s biggest news is that we’ve stopped selling our Google Drive version to new customers. Existing customers are not affected, and we will continue to update and support the app. To learn more, read our full Google Drive update.
We also shared a release that simplified our app’s UI further by hiding rarely-used toolbar buttons and replacing those distracting link hint icons with overlays. Check it out!
One last reminder just for you, our inner circle: the price for Wireframes for Desktop is going up soon, so buy or upgrade now if you’re thinking about it!
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Wireframing Academy news
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We’re deep into editing and polishing our forthcoming book about wireframing these days. We recently finished several iterations on some of the images and diagrams we’ll be using, which we’re really pleased with. We’re also thinking about pitching some talk ideas around our book to conferences happening later this year. If you know of any conferences that would be a good fit for us, please reply and let us know!
In the meantime, we’ve been working on improving the accessibility of our educational content by adding more transcripts, timestamps, captions, and descriptions to our videos. We’ve also started adding better alt text to all of our images.
Lastly, our most recent book newsletter highlighted 5 great articles about wireframing from the past year.
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We continued progress on a number of projects touching our customers, community, and team. Our mini-retreats continued, so our groups are feeling well-bonded and solid in their plans for the rest of the year.
- We’re continually testing our new ideas and features with our customers. Join our Research Program to get involved in our development process and help us make Balsamiq great for everyone.
- Notable recipients of our Free Software Program:
- Food Rescue US is a platform that allows volunteers, food donors, and food receiving/distribution agencies to coordinate pickups and drop-offs of food to those who need it.
- Speech and Language UK helps the 1.7 million children in the UK with challenges talking and understanding words.
- ASSIST India works for the development of poor and marginalized communities in rural areas of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, India.
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That's it for this month!
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In our opinion, not enough companies think about longevity—they’re all about short-term growth hacks and fast revenue. But we know there’s a more sustainable way to run a business, a team, or even a small project. Since you’re here, we think you agree.
Hopefully, this newsletter helps you along your journey building for the long run.
See you next month with more behind-the-scenes news from your friends at Balsamiq! And if there’s anything you want to read about in next month’s newsletter, hit reply to let us know.
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Arielle for the Balsamiq Team |
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