I’ve been aware of and vaguely familiar with Basecamp and these authors, but I’m glad I waited until I had spent a few years in a “real” job before reading this book because it made their observations and ideas that much more valuable. I loved this book and loved how easy it was to read. There is so much quality, “out-of-the-box” information throughout the book and it could not have been presented in a more succinct way. There are even pictures and graphics with each chapter!

During my quick read, there were a few chapters that I had to immediately share, and the fact that each chapter is usually just two pages made it just as easy to snap a picture of the open book and immediately capture basically all the information for each idea. My favorite chapter, by far, was the one on meetings and about how they are useless and a waste of time almost all the time. Even when meetings are needed, we usually approach them the wrong way with such long set times and very little direction in most cases.

This was just one of many chapters that I could immediately understand its value when looking at my own experience in my early career. While I have not yet developed a product completely on my own, I hope to use a lot of what this book covers as I continue to work on a small team at work, developing various applications. I think it’s a long shot to implement a lot of these ideas at a company level, given the set ways of older generations at the top of most companies, but I do hope that I’m able to apply most things personally and on a small team level.

In an ideal world, I’ll be able to continue to work and apply most ideas where I can so that if I do get the opportunity to start my own product and company or join a smaller, more progressive software team, I will have these ideas and my own slight tweaks to utilize. This book was a very quick read, but it’s also a perfect book to keep around and go back to quickly reference certain chapters.

My only knock on this book is that I do wish there was a little more information in each chapter with examples of how the Basecamp team and others have had success with the methods. It’s a small complaint, and honestly wish it just came with a companion book that expanded on all the ideas where I could just reference the few chapters that I wanted to read more on. The goal of this book was to waste no words, and it accomplished that goal for sure, so again, this is a very minor flaw in my eyes.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone to read since it is such an easy read, but I’d especially recommend it for those in software or other problem solving and creative-centered careers.