9 lessons we learned building Jam in 2024
5 million Jams created by 170k of you 💜 what a year!
Thank you for being a part of Jam this year! We crossed 6 million Jams, 170k users, shipped 31 new features and an entirely new Jam for your helpdesk, saved engineers 50+ years of debugging time (!) and got to meet 2,000 of you at a Jam meetup.
Everyone who Jams is a builder trying to make some corner of the world better through software. Y’all are awesome.
So, we wanted to end the year by sharing with you — builder to builder — 9 lessons we learned at Jam this year. And if you feel inspired, I’d love for you to hit reply and let me know a lesson you learned building your product.
Small teams, high ownership
This year we grew from 11 to 20 people, and split from one team into specialized pods. And… small teams with true ownership run faster and do more than I ever thought possible.
Quality requires engineering discipline.
It's a practice you have to keep. You don't just work on performance "this quarter". It's a mindset and a practice you stick to every day.
Getting over our process allergy.
When you're small, it's important to be allergic to process. But as you grow, a bit of process is needed so you can do more things than anyone can keep in their head. This year we added just a few templates, checklists and weekly reviews. At first I was resistant, but now can’t imagine how else we could manage so many parallel projects going on at any given time.Treat everything as user experience.
Even if it's an email, it's still a user experience. It takes longer to craft everything when you think like that. But, you end up shipping things that you're excited for users to experience! And that's super fun.
Great dev teams do the boring things well.
Investing in the boring things unlocks you to move on to new problems. Docs, testing, deployment, infra. It's really boring to upgrade your servers, but all that investment means we get to go even faster now (“and sleep better” says the currently on-call engineer).
1 + 1 designers = 3 designers
I used to worry that adding a second designer would slow us down, because instead of one person having all the context, they would need to coordinate. But actually, when we grew the design team, we were able to do even more because they had thought partners to think through our hardest design challenges. That was really cool to see.
The simple version is better.
When in doubt, ship the simplest thing. The live Jam product today started as an internal project called “Simple Jam”. The live Jam pricing started as an internal project called “Simple pricing”. The simplest version is simply better.
Hire people who awe you.
Hire people who love what they do. Hire people who care so darn much, you can’t help but smile when they share. The joy of building things happens in moments, day to day, week to week. The people you get to build with are everything.Time moves really fast in a startup.
A lot of things change in a year. Things grow up quickly. Cherish the moments :)
Now, onto 2025! Excited to continue the Jam journey with all of you. Thanks for being a part of it. Happy holidays and new year!
💜, the Jam team:
Thanks to the Jam team for these valuable lessons. I certainly relate to many if not all of those!
I learned many things from the way you guys are building Jam as a start up and as a product. Meeting Dani and Ivanha in Colombia was an absolute delight! 😊
Cheers to a 2025 filled with growth, fun, and new lessons!
Really enjoyed these lessons from building Jam! So many great takeaways about product development, iteration, and user experience. Thanks for sharing!