2020: year in review
Oh boy, where to even begin?
This year was bonkers and traumatic and challenging and interesting on so many levels that it feels a bit overwhelming to summarize — but year-in-review posts are a tradition (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019), so here we go, in little tidbits, without any expectation of completeness.
🎂 Five years of diesdas!
On December 4th our company turned five years old — wow, how time flies! Over these years we went from four people to thirty, from one client to dozens, from zero revenue to millions. Pretty incredible, looking back at the whole timeframe.
🎳 The year started out pretty ordinary
We traveled to Austria to visit two of our clients, looked at more office space (lol) in Kreuzberg and had one last team event, going bowling. Then, literally three days later, we all went home and most of us haven’t returned to the office since.
📹 Nine months of being a remote company
Then, in early March we became a full-remote company … good thing was that we were relatively well prepared — with our dev Sev in the UK we had a full remote employee already and workations had become popular as well, which definitely gave us a leg up. It’s slightly funny reading our blog post from June 2019 when we curiously and voluntarily went down the remote path.
😔 Challenges: uncertainty, home office and mental health issues
That doesn’t mean that we didn’t struggle though … economic uncertainty in the first half of the year, several people with kids suddenly at home, sub-optimal home office setups and no clear boundaries between personal and professional lives meant our collective mental health took a beating. As the year went on a few people struggled with exhaustion and burnout, others had close relatives die of Covid, some of us got the virus themselves and we admittedly didn’t put enough focus on keeping up the team spirit. Going out of 2020 we definitely retain some scars.
🤗 Four new people joined us from all over the world
As the year unfolded we hired four new people and were happy to welcome Mitch (from New Zealand, now living in Berlin), Ashley (from Zambia, now living in Portugal), Kuba (from Poland, now in Berlin) and Güngör (from Turkey, now in Berlin as well) to the team!
💸 Finances: a pretty good year in the end
While there was a lot of uncertainty how the pandemic would play out economically at the start in March and some smaller projects did get canceled, our project work more or less continued as expected throughout the year, closing with a few strong months in Q3 and Q4, reaching similar levels as 2019 overall. We didn’t need to switch to short-time work either (only did for parents to protect their sanity) and didn’t cut any salaries at any point in time; quite the opposite, we even paid out more money to employees than ever before.
🛠️ New tools, new workflows
The novel work situation also prompted new tooling: For the past years we’ve pretty much run the company on Personio, Harvest+Forecast, Slack, Zoom and Notion, but this year we’ve questioned some of these choices:
- Are we actually happy with Slack and all the noise it creates or are we just using it because everybody else does?
- Can we move all internal communication to Basecamp to foster asynchronous workflows?
- Would Asana be a better tool to organize our projects than Notion?
- Can we streamline some internal workflows by moving from Personio+Harvest+Forecast to Moco?
We haven’t made any decisions for the above questions yet. One new addition to our toolchain though is Miro as a digital whiteboard — over this year it’s become indispensable for running workshops and retrospectives.
💪 Projects, projects, projects
So what did we actually work on? As always many projects are under NDAs, but here are a few snippets:
- Continued our extensive collaboration with Red Bull
- Lots of fruitful work with ZEIT ONLINE: making articles more accessible through speech synthesis, shipping a new audio briefing format, running events like Deutschland spricht / Europe talks (and improving the My Country Talks software underpinning those), as well as revamping the My Country Talks website
- Relaunched the Selfapy website and brand
- Iterated on the HvD Fonts online shop and the GIZ Agripolicy Kit
- Won Grüne Erde as a client
- … and a ton more! It’s been a busy year for sure!
🤖 The AI Community and our book club thrive remotely
We used to run two event series regularly in our office: our community focused on artificial intelligence and our book club. Both of them continued throughout the year in remote form, arguably running better and being more accessible through Zoom.
☀️ Entirely flexible working hours
With days getting shorter and daylight fading, many people in the team requested a longer lunch break to catch some sun at least. Our working hours had already been quite relaxed with expected availability only between 11–12:30 and 1:30–3pm, but towards the end of the year we’ve completely removed any required availability. The only rule is that you need to coordinate with the people you work closest with … if they are fine with your desired work hours, feel free to work at night! 🦉
This gives everyone more flexibility, fosters asynchronous workflows, makes it easier to mix personal/professional lives and makes working across time zones easier. 👉 My colleague Maria wrote a whole blog post about this change!
📡 Getting better at remote team events
At first remote social events felt really awkward, but as the year progressed we’ve become much better at it … some of the things we did:
- frequent (and entirely voluntary) “checkout chats” at the end of the day
- bi-weekly “show & tell” format to share our work
- weekly chit-chats for whoever has time, sharing what happens in our lives
- remote drinks at least once (of course)
- some gaming sessions, playing Among Us, Skribbl.io and Stowaway
- For our Christmas party we cooked (and ate) Risotto together
- In one project team we did a mad Sherlock Holmes board game on Miro — screenshot somewhere below
Again, Maria wrote about all these shenanigans much more eloquently.
🏚️ Downsizing our office + more meeting rooms
In the end we didn’t get more office space, but made the only sensible choice: We were on two floors before and now got rid of the upper one, focusing on one space again. We expect many employees to work mostly remotely even after the pandemic, so we don’t really need that much space anymore.
Over summer a few people worked in the office and we realized that even with a few people, the need for meeting rooms often exceeded the capacity. So we got Dittmar + Friends to build us two additional meeting room cabins and they are gorgeous … photos below!
🖼️ A Zoom screenshot says more than a thousand words
I’m running out of topics and this post is already very long, so let’s look at some pictures before we close off:
🥴 Hello 2021!
It looks like the new year will continue like the old one ended: with everyone working from home and at least a few months longer until a vaccine might be available for us. We’ll use the time to refine our workflows, improvise remote team culture and, above all, design and build things. Thanks go out to everyone who was part of this challenging year: our team first and foremost, all our clients, freelancers, people who referred us and everyone who followed along! Stay safe, wear your masks and see you in 2021!
diesdas.digital is a studio for strategy, design and code in Berlin, featuring a multidisciplinary team of designers, developers and strategists. We create tailor-made digital solutions with an agile mindset and a smile on our faces. Let’s work together!
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