Week 33: And then there were six!
A new person joins the team in September and we couldn’t be more excited … it’s gonna be deadly! Full story inside!
Yo, this is Harry from diesdas.digital and it’s the 33rd week in a row that I’m spending my Saturday morning writing a blog post for your reading pleasure, summarizing what happens at our little company. This week’s edition is special though, because we’ve been giddy with excitement to finally announce the following …
… Sharon Walsh is joining us as our first full employee!
Wait, what? Let’s slow down for a second and start from the beginning, taking it one step at a time! 🐢
If you read any of our previous posts then you might know that we cannot complain about the project situation and that we’re always working on multiple things at the same time. Sometimes that’s tricky with only four people while dealing with the added overhead of keeping the company afloat (accounting, securing a full project pipeline, communications, …), so we knew we’d have to grow the team at some point. Our bottle neck has always been development, because it consumes far more time than any other discipline on projects and one designer can usually keep multiple developers busy. That’s why we got super lucky when Nicolás decided to come aboard, because being three developers allows us to tackle more projects and also do our work more thoroughly. Having Nicolás around already worked wonders for our productivity, but we haven’t fully resolved the situation yet … should our first real hire therefore be another developer? Sure, that’d be the obvious way to deal with said bottle neck, but it’s not the only way to increase our output.
Right now Lorenz and I are quite busy not only doing development, but we’re also involved in concept, strategy and design work on upcoming projects and early stages of current ones. So another way of improving the situation is bolstering our design power to free up large parts of Lorenz’s and my time — which then allows us to focus on writing more code and also makes life easier for Max and Lars.
This is why we didn’t take the obvious route of hiring another developer, but are instead going for a designer. And speaking of designers, we couldn’t think of a better person to join us than Sharon. Why? Lots of reasons actually:
- She’s an excellent, dedicated designer, with tons of experience in different fields, like branding, interaction design and graphic design, so our competence in design increases substantially. 💥
- She’s one of the nicest, brightest, most energetic people we know, always ready for a joke and a pleasure to work with. 🦄
- We feel she will add a new perspective and point of view to discussions we have about projects and our company, which we deem to be incredibly valuable. 🔭
- She’s from Ireland, so we can all speak English again, on a daily basis. 😅
How do we know all these things already, even though she only starts in September? Well, we’ve worked together before at Edenspiekermann, so we couldn’t be more optimistic about how all this will turn out. As already stated in the beginning: It’s gonna be deadly! 😏
Oh, and if you don’t know Sharon yet (you will, we’ll make sure of that in upcoming posts, haha), then here’s a nice little introduction. 👻
Among all the excitement we know that onboarding a new person is a challenge we shouldn’t underestimate. For example our main language in the office has been German so far, including all our internal communication (be it verbal or written in Slack). Things will have to change to create an inclusive and welcoming working environment that enables everyone to do their best work. We’re aware of this challenge and we’re taking it very seriously.
Another point of concern are legal documents like employment contracts that need to be in two languages from now on … after all we can’t expect somebody to sign a contract in a language they can’t fully understand, right? Luckily, drafting the employment contract in both German and English wasn’t a problem at all for our lawyer. (Seriously, this guy has super powers and whatever challenge you throw at him, he simply gets it done in record time! 🔥)
Anyhow, most of these changes and challenges might seem a bit daunting now, but more importantly present an opportunity for us to grow and become a more colorful company than we’ve been in the past. Which has been the goal all along — so we’re incredibly excited to take this step now! Welcome Sharon, welcome employee number one! It’s gonna be grand! 🙌
Anything else from this week?
Sure, tons of things, I could go on and on … but your attention span is limited and there are youtube videos of raccoons out there, and snapchat and Netflix, maybe even books or the outside world [😱] to get back to … so let’s make this quick! Our week in photos!
Pictured above: Lorenz and Lars enjoy their lives while Nicolás fixes bugs in Internet Explorer. The finishing touches on a web project always take way longer than expected and it happened multiple times that we thought we’d be done and then suddenly the to-do list grew to twenty items again. The last 10% always take as long as the 90% before. 😑
Pictured above: Lars in the zone, working on a presentation we’ll be delivering next week to win over potential clients. Our prospects are quite good, and if successful it’ll mean a huge, fun project, so we’re investing some more time up-front, giving the presentation the polish it deserves. 😬
Pictured above: Nicolás fixing even more bugs. On Friday we had a feedback talk and concluded that we very much enjoy working together, so we’re looking forward to more joint projects. Super happy to have you on board, buddy. 😊
Pictured above: Me, going through a project with the respective clients. Still loads to do, but we’re getting there. Having weekly check-ins to present the progress really helps to keep up a steady pace! 🏃
And that’s it for this time. Next week will be eventful and stressful, so we’ll get some rest now. You’ll be able to read all about it next Saturday, same time, same place (subscribe?) … if you don’t feel like waiting this long, you’re also welcome to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr or Facebook.
As always, all your feedback is welcome and if you enjoyed this post, consider tapping that heart below! 💚 I know, it’s a tad intrusive to ask for it, but everybody is doing it, so it seems to work. Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyhow, have a great weekend and see you around! Full steam ahead, the best is yet to come! 👋
