Weekly Recap #5: “Report to sick bay!”

Hey, hey. This is Harry from diesdas.digital and today’s recap will be a quick one, because we all have the flu and looking at a screen for more than 15 minutes makes my eyeballs pop out. Now, we don’t want that to happen, do we? Exactly. So we better get started!

Apart from being sick, it was a great week, as evidenced by the most popular emojis in our Slack:

We had a super productive kick off meeting with a client on Monday, I wrestled with Django, Django CMS and Heroku all of Tuesday, we had a great pitch presentation with a startup on Thursday and a couple of other interesting meetings on the side. Overall project work is progressing well and we are handling the multi-project situation better than in the beginning. Just looking at the workload we could probably already get more people on board … which is a scary thought.

Instagram by Norman Posselt, with whom we’ll hopefully be working in the future!

Anyhow, let’s continue with some random topics we chewed on this week:

We’re not a startup

We were called a “startup agency” in some newsletter last week and somehow that gave me a feeling of unease. Sure, we’re a startup in the sense that we’re a new company, but usually the term “startup” has many more connotations: We don’t have investors, in fact we don’t want any outside capital, we’re not in this for growth or IPOs or exits or making dents in the universe. We also don’t call ourselves “entrepreneurs”. Instead we’re four people building a sustainable business and having fun while doing so. And honestly, it’s kinda sad that something so basic needs to be clarified these days.

Mirrors. So fascinating!

“Scrum is the new waterfall”

Being a certified scrum master myself (and having to chuckle everytime I say that) I found this article rather interesting. While I agree with almost all the points raised I believe it’s also short sighted to trash the Scrum framework in general. Scrum has its right to exist as a necessary stepping stone for companies new to agile methods. Yes, it comes with a lot of rituals, yes, it can be annoying and tedious and it most definitely doesn’t follow “people over process”, but it gives structure and tells you what to do at which points in time—which is immensely helpful for companies afraid of letting go of control. It makes the transition to a truly agile way of working easier … maybe you follow all its rituals for a year and then start letting go of those that don’t fit your company. After all “inspect and adapt” should apply to the process itself as well.

I went through the official Scrum Master certification and all I got was this hideous PDF.

You can’t do marketing without involving product development

Last week we agreed to take part in a pitch presentation for a startup that makes an app for people to support each other. The brief was to come up with marketing ideas to boost their user count … when we sat down, looked at the app, interviewed actual users and came up with ideas, we realized that the better ideas we had all involved making tweaks to the app—and vice versa: fixing a few fundamental problems in the app would make promotion much easier. It all goes hand in hand and I believe you cannot look at “marketing” without also taking product vision and actual development into account. So we presented a holistic catalogue of ideas, based on user needs, involving tweaks to the app, supported by improvements to their website and didn’t waste a whole lot of time talking about twitter campaigns or facebook ads. The feedback we got was very positive, so we’ll see what the next steps are.

Working on the presentation, adding placeholder scribbles via Photo Booth.

Worthwhile reading and interesting finds

Wrapping it up with three links:

„‚Heute‘ ist viel wichtiger als ‚in fünf Jahren‘“
If you’re curious about journalism in the digital age and you understand German, read this interview with Jochen Wegner from ZEIT ONLINE.

Optimised for Internet Explorer 6!
Digital designer Fabian Burghardt published his Webolution project and I like it a lot! Having made websites for almost 15 years I’m definitely guilty of building some of these layouts myself. Trip down the memory lane!

InVision Craft
Chances are high you’ve heard about this one already, but if not: Craft by InVision looks like an easy way to avoid “best case” designs which sadly happen way too often. We’re excited to take it for a spin next week!

And that’s it. See you around! 🤖