CodeCarrot Playbook

It's all about CodeCarrot the way we work.

# This is our playbook.

We are CodeCarrot. We have worked with hundreds of product teams all over the world, from individual founders who are self-funded, to large multinational organizations. We have also created our own products and dozens of open source libraries.

This is our playbook. It details how we make successful web and mobile products, and also how we run our company. It's filled with things we've learned based on our own experience and study of others' experiences.

It is a living document that everyone at CodeCarrot can edit in a public GitLab repo.

We've made the playbook free and licensed it as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial so you may learn from, or use, our tactics in your own company. While our "plays" have worked for us, we trust your judgment over ours to decide which tools and techniques might work for you, too.

# Product Design Sprint

All our projects are design-led, starting with post-its and sketching, ending with design implemented as code in the app. We use design sprints and user research to understand our client's problems, validate assumptions about the products, and build products that are user-centered.

# Planning

One of our primary process goals is to make frequent, small releases of our working software. We do through frequent communication and weekly iterations on a product.

# Choose Platforms

Early in a project, we have to decide which platforms we'll use. Which platform depends on our ideas for solving these users' problems. After considering what's best for users, the best tools for us have a strong community, make us happy, and help us create and iterate quickly.

# Designing

Our human-centered design process is grounded in the principles of Design Thinking. It's the driving force behind our projects and teams. Designers keep this process alive by helping our teams understand user problems and needs. Together, we collaboratively and continuously ideate, build, and learn.

# Laptop Setup

Your laptop is your sword. Don't go into battle without it.

# Developing

The majority of our development practices were first detailed in Kent Beck's classic Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (opens new window) and in Gerald Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming (opens new window). We've tried its practices and found that using most of the practices most of the time improves the quality of our work and happiness of our team.

# Production

We live in a magical modern era where many problems have already been solved for us. We focus on the core product as much as possible and outsource operations as much as possible to external services.

# Measuring

The difficult part of measuring is deciding what to track. Dave McClure's AARRR framework provides a high-level overview of important metrics. We then use tactics such as event tracking to instrument those metrics.

# Our Company

We believe there is always a better way to do our work, and we want to find it and share it with as many people as possible.