What Shipped: Issue 7, 2021
Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future worth retiring into. We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process.
Here’s what we’ve been up to in the past few weeks:
- Process
Some of the Marketing team broke away and formed a new, cross-functional team with Khi from Operations to reinvigorate our employee onboarding experience with some new branding. - Brand
When it comes to our brand identity work, we’ve struggled to see the forest for all the trees. Amanda talks us through finding a creative partner to help us kill our darlings and nail down this brand system. - Socials
We’re starting to step-change how we use socials to connect more with the goings-on in the world. Melissa talks us through TikTok ideation, who we look to for inspiration, and shares some of the much anticipated social media strategy.
Process
We spend a lot of time thinking about how we work at Future Super. To avoid information silos, we’re trying out cross-functional teams.
J + K: It’s week two of Future Super’s first cross-functional team and we thought we’d celebrate with the first ever collab article for What Shipped. Khi and Jake have become Khake to reflect on week one of the employee branding team sprint.
Our remit: To create a sustainable onboarding experience that excites new starters and helps them understand Future Super’s culture, values and the way we work. So how has it been?
K: It felt like we were going into the first day of school. Here I was thrown in with the cool kids of the marketing team. What if they hate my ideas? WTF is ideation? Will Jake hate that I edited his copy when he is literally the copywriter?
J: For me it was the same. I have no idea about onboarding or managing people within a business at scale. I’m always happy to put ideas out there but I find myself asking: Is that right? What actually goes in an employee handbook? Why do I get to write our values (more on that later)? But it’s super exciting working with Khi! I love it when someone has the guts to edit my copy, because it starts a conversation.
K: What did help us was jumping in on our Team Charter session. Having a clear purpose, setting outcomes and identifying our operating rhythms set us up for success (so far). It also became a little preview for what it would be like to work together — if a 1.5 hour Zoom meeting at 5pm was fun with these people, surely it would be fun forever.
J: Thankfully it only has to be 4 weeks of fun. Forever is a pretty high benchmark. But it has been heaps of fun learning from each other, especially when we’re doing it with a shared team objective. Let’s talk about the best parts of this experience?
The Good Things
K: When Future super said — we’re giving you time, resources and support to work on your project — I screeched in excitement. I told my boss that it was like working on a uni project but you actually like your team, they show up on time, and you’re getting paid to create something you care about. She said, “so it’s nothing like a uni project”.
J: Preach! So much that’s hard about my job is getting people to take the time to actually give me the information I need. Copywriting is kind of like making a sculpture. My job is to craft the final piece and make it something everyone can appreciate, even though we all see it differently. But instead of having to dig for clay myself, now Khi just puts it in my hands and then we get to mould it together. It’s really changing the way I approach my work.
K: In this very short time, I can feel I’m transforming to a well rounded “professional”. I’ve taken bits and bobs from what Jake and Nick do best — being creative! Coming up with ideas or writing, and having a short turnaround to producing is really scary. But having a team of super sick legends who make you feel like a legend just by having an opinion is key.
J: Honestly I’m super impressed with the can-do attitude. I can tell writing makes Khi nervous and yet she agreed to co-author an article with me. Transformative is a good word to describe how this feels for our work. How’s the transition been though?
K: Transferring my workload to a team that’s already stretched, felt… sensitive? In the end I felt that being organised would be the best way to show my team that I appreciate them. So I tightened our processes and tried to leave detailed instructions. Apparently it’s been pretty useful. I’m going on holidays after the experiment too so it was valuable to pave the way for job sharing.
J: That seems like a good segue to reflecting on some of the tough stuff.
The Challenges
J: If this was the first day of school, then our old school mates still really want to hang out with us. It’s been hard at times to put aside our usual work and focus on the task we’ve set ourselves. Look your boss in the eye and tell them you’re not working on that — I dare you.
Seriously though, I have been doing that and while it doesn’t come easy, it is liberating to have the space for honesty about my priorities. We’re testing out the balance of fluid team structure and that’s always going to take time.
K: Agreed. It’s really hard to say no and I’m still finding the balance between being loyal to my actual team, and being loyal to my new team and our purpose.
Switching the brain from reactive work with a lot of output to deep work with a lot of preparation, has also been a self inflicted battle. I have had to continually reassure myself that research and thinking IS WORK, not just what you produce or tick off your list.
J: Personally I’m finding the work switching gives me energy. It’s a bit like working in an agency again — with none of the bad stuff about agencies. But if I had my time again I’d plan for all my other work to end before joining a new team. Marketing is launching its biggest campaign for the year right now and I’m having to keep one ear to the ground for where I’m needed while still throwing myself into this new way of working.
That’s probably a lesson for the next people to form one of these teams. What would you tell the next team to do differently?
K: More time to prep! It was a time crunch finishing off sprint work while also getting ready to pass on my workload to the team. Not to mention my mind had started to wander off to this exciting project. Speaking of…
What’s happened so far?
J: Exciting indeed! I’ve been sidetracked by the important things like, “what are we going to call these new cross-functional teams? Cross-functional just sounds so boring…”.
J: I guess we landed on Swarm (for now). Woohoo collaboration already! In all seriousness though, I feel like this sprint has brought out a new, organised Jake. He has structure and process and cool shit like that and it’s helped to coordinate our approach.
Last week, Khi mapped out our onboarding journey, Nick looked at tools and ways we could scale, I started mapping pain points and coordinating interviews with staff and managers. It’s been like three-way table tennis, always keeping you on your toes. That’s when we started talking about doing a values reset.
K: The conversation started with Jake popping by for a quick chat on Gather Town to propose the scary proposition that we swarm all over Future Super and crowdsource a values reset in a week. When we pitched it to Nick, we got the most on brand response ever. He simply asked: why do we need values at all? 🤯
This sent Jake and I into a frenzy, down a rabbit hole of all the possibilities, like a couple of kids at the candy shop looking for our next sugar high. We ended up making Nick a little scared of his own idea. But being unique, progressive and rebellious is supposed to be a little scary right?
J: Unique, progressive and rebellious has kind of become a bit of a team mantra and we’re living for it. Can’t wait to see where it takes us.
— Jake + Khi
Brand
Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a match. We’re tightening up our brand expression and we needed to find the right partner to help us. Here’s how our matchmaking process worked.
Over the past year, we’ve done a lot of work on our positioning, messaging and our expression. Some of it has worked well, some of it hasn’t. All of it has taught us something. Our team holistically has a really strong grasp on who our audience is and who we are. But after a few attempts at rounding that out into a coherent but flexible identity, it became clear that we needed some help.
What signalled that we needed help?
As we’ve built up a new identity, there have been some notable changes in terms of execution. This is not uncommon, rather should be expected as we’ve taken an approach of ‘iteration and evolution’ vs set in stone identity. That said, a defining quality of a successful brand is the coherence of execution. Many brands try but most struggle.
When we reached a point where it felt like we continued to try new things and change direction just because we could, instead of making clear choices and sacrificing variety for the sake of consistency and coherence — it signalled time to look for some external help pulling together and making sense of the work we’d done.
So, we needed a partner who could help us achieve this:
Here are the things we looked for in our shortlist:
- Craft and capacity for verbal & visual identity work, since language is a big part of our work
- Communication
- Chemistry
- Strategy
- Enthusiasm for the opportunity
Here’s how we ran the process:
- Initial reach out to 5–6 partners, explain the challenge we’re facing and see who was up for it. This phase was helpful — folks asked good questions and communicated about their minimum budget (which knocked some of our potential partners out of the running).
- Shortlist & team chemistry interviews: to let the teams who’d be working together actually talk to each other. Danny took the lead on pulling together an anonymous feedback form so the team could share their thoughts / preferences on who they wanted to work with.
- Made a proposal to the team using an integrated decision making process. I used the input from the team and my own impressions to make a proposal to the team about who we’d work with (and how). The team asked clarifying questions, made alterations to the proposal, and then approved it once we’d all had a chance to input.
What I learned:
1. Sharing a clear budget upfront made the process so much faster and easier.
Folks opted in and out based on what they could and couldn’t do vs doing the dance of ‘we’d love to work with you’, have a million chats and then get a shock when you realise your fees are wildly out of alignment with their needs. Why doesn’t everyone do this!?
2. Location was more important than I initially thought.
One thing that I didn’t think was important but became more important over time was location: we spoke with a few partners that weren’t in Sydney initially. However…we’ve all been working semi-remotely for a year now; I think we will really benefit by spending time together IRL working on this: remote tools just don’t always cut it when you’re tossing around ideas and sitting next to someone looking at their screen.
3. Next time, I’ll be explicit on when I expected final docs / props from partners.
I thought organising diaries for the team chemistry sessions was going to be the hardest part, but not having a deadline for the shortlisted partners to send final proposals dragged the process out by weeks and added frustration to an otherwise smooth process.
— Amanda
Socials
Creating a north star, signals, and getting that TikTok groove train going choo choo!
Settling in can take some time, and one thing I kept saying to myself has been “be fast in order to last”, which is far from the case at Future Super. It can take an average of 3–6 months to get into the habit and knack of things. In the past it has been in my psyche to only be seen and not heard, which has lead to burnout and unnecessary stress. Here, my team has given me the confidence to really get down to business.
We’ve started having fortnightly Social Media Ideation sessions.
What’s that?
Glad you asked, this is where we take the time to put our quick thinking caps on, and race to a timer creating all things social.
Last week we played around with some TikTok trends and sounds in order to create something tangible and within the superannuation scope. Who knew superannuation could have a presence on social media? I certainly didn’t.
The results were hilariously wonderful and I’m gearing up to create some content and roll things out consistently on TikTok as well as our other social media platforms so that we’re on the ball - ear to the ground, fly on the wall type of energy. Lots of songs? Most likely. Lots of dancing? Probably not, but never say never!
Social Media Strategy Pipeline — the awesome-est strategy in the business *shh*
Talking about having our ear to the ground, our social media strategy has been shipped, un-docked, and is smooth sailing.
Here’s the lowdown of what’s to come and what we’ve been thinking about on socials:
Sparking Conversation — having our ear to the ground, being unapologetic, setting the standards.
- What will this feel like? Lots of juicy replies, re-tweets, shares, saves, mentions, and DM’s.
- What will this look like? We’re thinking Betoota Advocate, Punkee, Planet Money, Diet Prada (but softer) and We Are Not Really Strangers.
Amplifying Action — uplifting our allies, communities, and our members, supporting the people on the ground making our world a greater place to retire into.
- What will this feel like? Tags, mentions, hashtag growth, collaborations.
- What will this look like? iWeigh, Humans of New York, Activist, Dude With A Sign.
Igniting Impact — we want to inspire others to lead and have confidence in their money by sharing our business practices, tools, reviews, and decision making process.
- What will this feel like? Tags, mentions, hashtag growth, shares, re-tweets, other businesses taking our lead
Lots to cover, a lot more to come!
Stay tuned and (*subtle plug*) be sure to follow us on our social platforms. It helps us boost our social strategy’s signals for when we get things right. PLus you’ll get a good idea of who we are, and what we care about!
TikTok — @futuresuper
Instagram — @future_super
Twitter — @myfuturesuper
Excited to get chatty on our socials, until next time
— Melissa
