As we wind up yet another cycle from solstice to solstice, and the arbitrary change of the year counter, it is always a good time to reflect on the goings of the past cycle. On a global level, 2025 continued to be a crazy year. The global limelight continued to be focussed on Donald Trump and AI and the regular warnings of upcoming financial crisis (and climate crisis) - which do not seem to come. On the whole, the world seems to be doing okay. We created more “stuff”, built more roads, bridges and housing across the world, extracted more minerals, wrote more software, launched more rockets even though some places continued to see conflicts. While there were headwinds, the human race seems to be going on in full steam ahead.

Things at Frappe also continued to grow. Some years at Frappe turn out to be “foundational” years, and 2025 was probably one of them. It feels odd that for a company that is already pushing on 18 years, still has foundational work to do, but that his how things have been. Frappe’s growth has been slow and steady and in spurts and bursts. Those who have been tracking will know that there have been several set backs as well. An organisation usually ends up responding to the kind of “pull” it has from the market and for Frappe, that pull has come at a slow rate. Some of the “institutional building work” only happens when the organisation grows beyond a certain size or has crossed a certain age. Learning from our past failures, every time we feel we are older and wiser, only to be woken up on the next crisis.

Constitution

Frappe has been on this journey of being a democratic company for the last few years. We have run several experiments and fine tuned our way of working. This year at our first off-site, one of our newer members (Safwan) asked us if there was a document that defined how we operated and that triggered us to define the Constitution. There were several people who were laughing as we discussed it, maybe it felt like a comedy. Why should a company even have a Constitution. But finally we did define the broad contours of how the company should operate as a democratic company. How rules get made, how decisions get made, how the CEO and cabinet are formed, how people get hired, how people get fired, how expenses are controlled and so on.

The quixotic core idea is that the company is primarily run by the people who are part of it and the rights of shareholders are limited to financial gains and under crisis. You can read the constitution at https://frappe.io/constitution

Structure

For the longest time, things just happened at Frappe without much discussion or planning. Things moved on individual initiative and intuition. Every time the community asked us for a road map, we said that it’s “magic”, and felt very smug about it. While this worked for a small company, as we kept growing, the lack of structure was biting us in several ways. First was “coverage”. We could not say for sure which parts of the products worked well and which did not. Also there were lots of areas where no one was particularly working on. If we wanted to improve our quality to the next level, we realised that no corner should be left untouched. For this we finally bit the bullet and started to create some structure in the team, starting with product management.

At Frappe we encourage all engineers to “own” the creation process of the product. They need to be their own first users and should try to build a product that appeals to their own taste. This makes the feedback loops and iterations very quick. This works in the initial phase of the product where there are very few users. We also use all our products internally at Frappe, so the second set of users becomes the team members. Once a product hits the “market” and starts getting external users, then there comes a point where the product engineer is unable to keep track of all the incoming feedback. This is where product managers help. This is also where complex use cases start appearing that require brain storming and design help. Product mangers can help manage the incoming flow of requests and also help in testing and marketing. Michelle and Dipen have started the journey and we hope to add more product managers at Frappe soon.

There are several people now in Frappe whose job is not to do the work but to “facilitate” it. We debated a lot on the right word for the people who do indirect work. Should they be called managers, or leaders? Or maybe facilitators? Adam Smith called them “philosophers” in the Wealth of Nations. Each of these terms has its own meaning / vibe. When someone is a leader, then the others become followers. When someone is a manager, they are supposed manage the work of the people. We did not want either of these strong terms. I guess philosopher was too weak. Taking inspiration from the democratic schooling movement, the current term we define is a “facilitator”. It is a mellow term compared to both leader and manager, and assumes that the primary “agency” to get work done lies with the person and job of the facilitator is just to aid the person in getting their goals met.

Leadership

While everyone needed to work and facilitators were needed to facilitate, there is yet another category of people whose job would be to “steer” the ship in the right direction away from icebergs and towards some destination. These people are focussed on making the right investments and also ensuring that the current investments are in the right direction. For a company like Frappe, most of our investments are in people and the job of the leaders then becomes to hire the right people and ensure that the people in the team have the right context to perform and also weed out people who are just not right for the team. For the longest time, finding the right leaders has been a struggle. This year though, Neha and Ankush have stepped up to help me in the “steering” role. I am hoping this time we get it right.

What to expect in 2026

The focus will continue to be on the quality and the consolidation of our portfolio. Over the last few years, we have spread ourselves out from the core Framework and ERP into several new products and now is the time to consolidate these into a coherent offering for the users. Proprietary software vendors are still dominating the industry and Frappe’s opportunity is to create a strong open source alternative to the proprietary ecosystems - the ones run by Microsoft, Google, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce. This is a massively ambitious goal and something we are committed to work on as long as we have the ability to keep pushing new software and updates.

No discussion about the future would be complete without discussing about AI. At Frappe we continue to struggle to find the right use cases internally for AI. We tried to add AI to our support portal and we did not see any major productivity boost. AI mostly solved the “easy” tickets that did not require a lot of deep investigation. While we have not been successful so far, we will continue to run internal experiments. The moment we find the right model, we will add it to our product lines. So far AI does not seem to help us in our problems, or maybe we don’t have the right imagination for the same.

That’s it for now. Hope you had a great 2025 and wish you an even better 2026. Let us know how we did and if we can do anything better. We are always open to learn!

Frappe Flashback 2025