On Monday we launched Rypple 3.0 to the world.  The response has been great, with great coverage, and more importantly very positive feedback (and usage data) from existing and new users. The six month journey from 2.0 to 3.0 has been a great learning experience for the entire team.  I wanted to share a bit of the background of “why 3.0” with you.

Why we built 3.0

In short, we built 3.0 to further our vision of a better workplace, with high-performance teamwork driven by more real, relevant and real-time feedback.  From day one, we knew that achieving this vision with software would be difficult.  Team dynamics are super complex.  Previous attempts at building software have been “enterprisey” – very top down and static.

To tackle this difficult human interaction problem we decided to build Rypple as if it were consumer software.  That means, lots of fast iteration, user testing and really listening to feedback.  And more importantly, a focus on end-users and their needs – not the needs of business buyers.

In the beginning, we built a super-simple tool for requesting anonymous feedback.  That product spread quickly. We got great coverage, and that led to attention and interaction with really smart end-users at places like IDEO, Google, Mozilla, and Rackspace.

Learning

We learned two things from our first attempt. First, “feedback at work” means more than “an easy way to ask for anonymous responses.” Our users told us that a great feedback culture had lots of face-to-face coaching, alignment and conversation around goals, and regular public recognition.  A great feedback culture would obviate the need for traditional performance reviews.  And, importantly, we heard that this had to come from everyone – not just your boss. Second, we discovered that some people already engage in these basic, social behaviors. The  key was to build software that amplified the existing behaviors that some people already engage in at work so that most people engaged in them regularly.

Amplify Existing Social Behavior

If you think about it, amplifying existing social behavior is the core strength of great social software.  People used text messages to tell their friends they were at a bar before Foursquare. Foursquare just amplified that behavior and made it more efficient and fun.  Kids checked out real facebooks and posted messages on dorm-room doors before the advent of the Facebook.  And people shared photos, links, and organized events by email before Flickr, Twitter, and Eventbrite.  The designers of these social tools were geniuses for finding behaviors that already existed and using software to make them much, much easier and more accessible.

So, for us, the process has been about finding what people already do that supports a great culture of feedback and make it accessible, useful, and really awesome!

Rypple 2.0 was a first cut. We had manager coaching, basic badges for recognition and feedback. We acquired hundreds of customers and learned from them what worked and what didn’t. But, it just wasn’t quite right. Our fast iterative process resulted in an app with too many “barnacles” – stuff that built up over time that made it hard to be fast, efficient and easy.

Make It Super Freaking Awesome

The real catalyst that sparked the journey to 3.0 came from power user feedback like this:

The experience (of Rypple 2.0) so far is good. … [But] it still feels like a separate thing I have to go and consciously do, rather than something I just do out of habit. Know what I mean here? So good and useful but… I just really want to see it become SuperFreakingAwesome…

At that point, we recommitted ourselves to building something even more awesome.  We wanted to take everything we had learned about how great people interacted at work and take our service to the next level.  We wanted to learn how great managers did 1:1 meetings, how teammates recognized each-other, and how and when people really asked for feedback.

In my next post, I’ll talk about what exactly we did…