Lessons from Panic Inc

Panic is a team-based out in Portland, America who published the recent video game Untitled Goose Game and the award-winning Firewatch.

What you may not know is that Panic’s legacy was built crafting Apple applications, especially those who help web-developers.

Other core products of theirs include, Coda, Transmit and Prompt. It was only later in 2016 they starting publishing video games.

Here are three lessons we can learn from watching how they work.

Lesson One: Focus

Panic’s products are excellent, and if a product is not exceptional or preforming as hoped, the team will cut the product from their range. Status Board was an excellent example of this. Status Board was an iOS app designed to create beautiful data dashboards, however back in 2016 they announced they were discontinuing the product due to lack of market, you can read more about that here.

Lesson Two: Transparency

Panic has always been open and transparent in the way they operate. Their blog is fantastic look into how they work and the direction they’re facing.

I believe that transparency is a good indicator that a business is moving forward and keen to take their customers on that journey.

Lesson Three: Self Awareness

I believe Panic understand their key audience and products, which in turn is their core income. While Panic is now publishing games, their focus is on building a suite of development tools for an audience which they have grown over many years.

For a long time, they ran their customer services enquires through Twitter, giving customers a quick and direct way to reach them.

Panic has been around for 22 years, and I expect they will be around for 22 more. They consistently build outstanding products, and we should all be looking towards them.

Image from https://panic.com