Joshua Hirsch, Technology Director at Big Spaceship shared his company's process philosphy as well as some of their creative projects with us today. On work philosophy, Big Spaceship seems to work using agile development principles which I discussed briefly in yesterday's Feed the Experts post. Teams at Big Spaceship are organized by project instead of by job title. You won't see rows of coders sitting at desks at Big Spaceship. Instead, staff are organized into teams which have experts in development, design, production and strategy all sitting and working together on a single project.
It took Big Spaceship years to adopt this model, but everyone (including Hirsch who was skeptical about the organization to begin with) found this team approach to be beneficial. Hirsch pointed out that it was more valuable for one team member to be able to turn in their chair and ask their colleague about a project instead of about code in general.
A few other principles of the Big Spaceship work philosphy are:
- There's no "creatives" team in their workplace. Everyone is creative.
- There's no one holy creative person either -- that means no Creative Director. Ideas can come from anywhere.
- Experiment constantly, not just for clients.
- Fun begets quality. A good work environment and culture is important.
- And taking a page from Google, Hirsch's one slide in his presentation read, "Don't hire assholes, no matter how talented."
Does their approach work? By the looks of their work, I'd say yes -- it works very well. Take a look at some of Big Spaceship's experiments at labs.bigspaceship.com.
