We just got back from a lovely week in Montréal for our company meet-up. About 60 of us explored the city, shared meals, worked on interesting projects, came up with a small pile of exciting ideas, and talked about what's next.
We also took a bunch of photos.
As is our tradition, people posts their photos in the meet-up project for all to enjoy.
That's when Ashley from our Customer Success team posted an idea to our Quick Wins card table — you should be able to boost files in Basecamp!
Boosts are like reactions you find in some products, but better 🙂. Each boost stands alone and can include text, too. You can boost almost everything in Basecamp — docs, comments, chats, pings, to-dos, cards — but not files.
Ashley captured in perfectly:
We also took a bunch of photos.
As is our tradition, people posts their photos in the meet-up project for all to enjoy.
That's when Ashley from our Customer Success team posted an idea to our Quick Wins card table — you should be able to boost files in Basecamp!
Boosts are like reactions you find in some products, but better 🙂. Each boost stands alone and can include text, too. You can boost almost everything in Basecamp — docs, comments, chats, pings, to-dos, cards — but not files.
Ashley captured in perfectly:
Comments are great, effective. But we all love a boost, yeah?!
I would love to be able to leave boosts on files uploaded to Basecamp. A perfect example would be our Meetup Photos. So many of them deserve a ❤️ or a 🤭 but a comment feels like it's too much.
We have boosts for Basecamp Docs and I would expect them to be available for files as well. Of course I'm not sure how labor intensive this would be so if it's a Not Now situation, happy to write this up as a Voice of the Customer Employee doc. (WHICH you can boost.)
Dorin, one of our product designers, agreed it was an obvious missing piece and shipped the change 5-minutes later.
Okay, technically 7 minutes. As he put it: 1 min to add, ~1 min to test, 5 min to deploy.
It's a great addition, perfect for photos, logos, and any other files you might upload.
Files share properties with most other things in Basecamp, so it was easy to add. We just hadn't enabled boosts for them yet.
But that alone isn't how something goes from idea to live in 5 minutes.
People have to feel a sense of ownership, whether you're sharing the idea or making it a reality. You also need to know you're trusted to take action.
We don't have a release schedule to follow or hoops to jump through — anyone on the team can deploy anytime. No one checked to see how often this has been requested, dug into the metrics of how boosts are used, or, most importantly, asked permission first.
Just saw something missing, added it, and shipped it.
✅ Done.