A small studio in Lisbon has released four products in six years. Every one of them is still running, still maintained, and profitable. I spent an afternoon there asking why they are not bigger.
You could have taken on three times the work. Why didn't you?
Because the work we turned down was the work that would have made the rest worse. We are eleven people. Eleven people can hold one thing carefully or four things badly. That is not a philosophy, it is arithmetic.
How do you decide what to refuse?
We ask whether we would still want to be maintaining it in five years. That question kills most proposals in about a minute. It also protects clients from us, because a studio that takes work it does not want will do a competent job and never a good one.
Your release notes are famously short.
If a release needs three pages of explanation, we have shipped a change to how something works rather than an improvement to how well it works. We take that as a warning sign now. The best releases are boring to describe and obvious to use.
We do not have a roadmap. We have a list of things that annoy us, in order.
And the four-day week?
Four years in. Output went up in the first year, which we do not entirely trust, and then settled roughly where it was before. What genuinely changed is that nobody makes a bad decision at six on a Thursday because they want to go home. The expensive mistakes in this trade are made by tired people in a hurry.
What would you tell a team that wants to work this way?
Start by writing down what you will not do. Everyone has a list of principles about what they value. Almost nobody has a list of the work they refuse, and that second list is the one that decides what your studio actually becomes.
