This week we celebrated 10 years as a company. We held a workshop to design concepts in response to insights from our innovation advisory board. We played some team games on Luna Park. We kept our tradition of enjoying a sweet treat and sharing a photo with the team.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been taking the time to unpack my thoughts on shaping this company and product for 10 years. As you can imagine, it’s a lot for our brief Friday Ship format. Here’s the short form.

I greatly appreciate the teammates I’ve worked with over the years. We’ve done good work together through the ups and downs. We’ve shipped some home runs and some flops. We’ve grown together.

We’ve made friends and fans of customers, and we’ve disappointed customers. We’ve learned a lot from them! Thank you, customers, for all the feedback — good, bad, and ugly. Apologies for when we’ve dropped the ball. Thanks for sticking with us.

As the world of remote work has corrected and contracted since the pandemic, and with no shortage of challenges in the economy, our team grew and later had to contract. We miss our teammates who are no longer with us. We’re grateful for our team that is still together. Thank you for being part of Parabol.

I’ve jotted down the top learnings that I’ve been pondering:

Learning and iteration are still key. “Ship leaner and more frequently. Test what you can with prototypes, concepts, and manual service if possible.” Discomfort with shipping is acceptable provided efforts remain ethical and lawful. Simplicity often delivers substantial returns. Pivot away from underperforming directions without hesitation.

We have a cultural value that encourages us to do things that are “safe to try.” This concept deserves clarification—it signifies pursuing maximum acceptable risk rather than maximum caution.

You can move fast and grow without over-optimizing. Resist premature optimization of products, systems, teams, or strategies. The dual cost—opportunity loss plus technical debt repayment—proves significant. Poor features, oversized teams, inflexible commitments, and maintenance burdens accumulate quickly.

We’re a little long in the tooth, but in many ways it feels like it did 10 years ago. Making software that works for people is hard, and that challenge keeps us energized. We’re at a point where we can lean into developing new ideas even over having to maintain growth. There are solid opportunities in front of us. We’re excited about our designs for innovative software.

We’re doing our best to treat each other well, do great work, and adapt to how the world’s working. Thanks for following along with us.

This week we…

…held a workshop to explore user journeys. Our advisory board helped us discover and validate a number of use cases we’ve been interested in. We’re looking to both expand our product and our opportunity in the market. Next steps: we are sketching up lo-fi concepts to build out as prototypes to gather more feedback.

Next week we’ll…

…ship our Pages feature to all users. We’re working on stability and performance before we move out of beta into production.

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Originally published as Parabol Friday Ship #457