Weekly Recap #12: “Man, this week was crap!”
Hello there stranger, this is Harry from diesdas.digital and you’re reading our 12th weekly recap. Are you enjoying the long Easter weekend, procrastinating on your couch? Good! That means you might have four minutes for our weekly ramblings — just keep on scrolling!
Let’s cut to the chase … this week was shit!
Lorenz started out being sick, then my laptop broke, followed by a project completely exploding, then Max got sick and Lars spent the whole week doing accounting. All while we’re working towards two pretty ambitious deadlines. Meh. Not fun.
Sure, we also made progress on other projects, but so much time this week was wasted by technical problems and sickness… really quite frustrating.
Then one project went haywire and showed that your business card may say “designer” or “developer”, but 50% of your job requires a completely different skill set: diplomacy, mediation, empathy, writing. These are soft skills often overlooked in job interviews, where the focus is on hard facts, portfolios, previous work experience. And yet, communication skills are so much harder to acquire and teach than knowing the latest tools inside out — and usually end up being just as important in everyday work.
Luckily, we mostly got matters under control by the end of the week. Phew.
Now for something fun: In the last recap we promised stickers to everyone who wanted some. When we founded the company we had these made for ourselves (illustration by Max), but we ended up ordering way too many … so why not just give them away? 12 people actually responded, so we went all-in on the analog game and it seems everyone was pretty happy about what they received. The supply is depleted for now, but we’ll order a second run for sure!
The sticker packages may seem like a minor, fun thing to do, but for me getting these right was quite important … after all, people expressed an interest in us and therefore I wanted to make sure they found something delightful in their mailbox. Preparing these packages served as a physical reminder that every single email you send out, every tweet, every photo, every interaction influences how you are perceived by the outside world — this is all part of branding and user experience.
Besides tearing our hair out and packaging stickers, we also agreed to start a new project. Naturally there’s gonna be a kick-off meeting which basically serves as a briefing, posing another challenge: do you charge money for such a meeting? How much? How many people go? Does it send the wrong signal to initially work for free? Or is it a necessity to “invest” up front, gaining trust?
Obviously the answers depend on a lot of factors (current workload, financial situation, size of your team, potential reward and complexity of the project, …), but if anyone reading this came up with a rule of thumb: please share! We are treating this on a case-by-case basis right now, but some guidance would be helpful.
All of these thoughts are part of a broader theme: this week’s challenges forced us to reflect on our goals, what we deem important and who we want to be as a company. It’s easy to get lost in the daily rush and just push stuff out in some way, but our goal is obviously to do things the right way. Now, what that means differs from person to person, but at some point we found it helpful to come up with some overarching principles for our company. This sort of happened accidentally in a presentation we gave last month, which contained a slide with a rough set of such guidelines. Reflecting on the events of this week I refined and translated that slide and here it is:
The events of this week forced us to pause and think … so it wasn’t “crap” after all. Sure, the last days were intense and not always pleasant, but they also gave us the opportunity to grow. At least in hindsight, that’s great! 🙃
Somewhat related, trying not to operate on default settings: “This is Water”
