Invoke — What Comes Next
It’s been nearly 5 years since I joined Invoke. As the CEO during this time, I’ve had the fortune of working with an incredible team on many exciting products with great clients. Our team brings together curiosity and drive, and embraces the ongoing evolution of our work and our business.
The best version of Invoke is one that continuously evolves. If we aren’t iterating on the business, our process, and our work, we’re falling behind.
In that spirit, as we look towards 2019, I’m excited about What Comes Next for Invoke.
The Future of (Agency) Work
Throughout our history of creating digital products, we’ve seen how the consultancy and studio landscape has shifted, and how Invoke might evolve. We’ve embraced the future of work — using the tools and processes that allow for a team that works from anywhere. This opens up the opportunity to examine what it means to be an Invoker.
We’re evolving how we approach product delivery, adopting the “Hollywood model” of work — where a project is identified, a specialized team is assembled, and once the project is completed, the team disbands and moves on to other projects.
For Invoke, this means bringing leadership from the experienced, senior practitioners that make up the core Invoke team, and working hands on with our deep talent pool of Invoke alumni, specialized freelance talent, and trusted partners. As we work with companies and businesses across a wide array of industries, our model is to activate this pool of talent to construct a specialized team to address the specific needs of each product.
With a strong network of trusted talent with deep, specialized experience that they can bring to a given project, it means that every Invoke project team is composed with the relevant expertise to make the product smart, useful, and magical.
A New Home Base
As we’ve shifted towards this model, we’ve also considered how our office space can support this change. At Invoke, we’ve historically had great office spaces. Big spaces with room to host events, the team, and even other companies in our Co-Workshop. However, with a work model that supports distributed and remote work and with the significant amount of time we spend embedded in our client’s spaces, there were more and more days where our actual office looked a little sparse. The Slack replies were still coming fast, but the desks just weren’t being used.
After being inspired by many stories of success in moving into WeWork, including our friends at Foodee, we made the jump ourselves this December. The move from managing our own office space to joining the WeWork community means our energy is now focused 100% on creating incredible digital products. Sure, we’re still adapting to a few things — we’re trying not to leave our post-it notes up all around the shared meeting rooms — but it’s been exciting.
And the view is great.
These changes are exciting. We have a new home and a new working model; both of them supporting our creation of smart, useful, and magical products.
This is what 2019 looks like for Invoke, and we’re looking forward to seeing the ways in which we continue to evolve.
