How Utrust led a 100% remote Design Sprint in 3 days
The world is changing, and Utrust saw that change coming. Now, we want to help steer it.
Utrust’s office in Braga, Portugal, remains largely unoccupied. With the COVID19 pandemic hitting Northern Portugal harder in its early stages than it did the rest of the country, the company immediately shifted gears to a fully-remote operation, and the adaptation has been so successful that we haven’t looked back since. Sanja Kon, Utrust’s CEO, thinks a part of this change is permanent. “People will expect to work remotely from now on” she says. Every day, someone goes to the office, now that restrictions have been lifted. Whoever they are, they often find themselves alone. And that suits Utrust just fine. They’re actively embracing the new normal. Braga hasn’t registered a new COVID case since June the 6th, and everything is reopening, but Utrust being so remote-friendly from its beginning, and having embraced working from afar with such ease, they felt they were ready to pioneer something different. “We weren’t spending time at the office, but we wanted to hang out, exchange ideas”, says Sanja.
That’s how the Design Sprint came to be.
“It’s a good story, actually!” says Antonin Hackenberg. He is Head of Engineering at Utrust, and he is working from Prague, in the Czech Republic. He seems genuinely excited to tell this story, speaking with a massive smile. “We were supposed to be doing a Design Sprint. It should take five days.” A Design Sprint is a concept invented by Jake Knapp at Google. There are five stages to it, and it should, ideally, help a team perfectly understand a new product or idea, its problems and limitations, before actually making it. And do it quickly. “We had a working prototype in three.”
“Hackathons are usually product-related”, says Sanja. “This is the first time that we did a cross-department hackathon.” Having realized that remote work may be here to stay, an adjustment was necessary. So the whole week was cleared to gather the leaders of every department in the company in a massive remote gathering of minds.
Rodrigo Russell, Utrust’s COO, was the person who actually came up with the theme. Can Utrust work as a B2B provider? Is there space in the market for the company? Nikita Savitskiy is Utrust’s Head of Service Design, and his enthusiastic way of speaking through gestures is as captivating on camera as it must be in person. “We identified an interesting topic. Countries that have access to crypto exchanges may present an amazing opportunity to get ahead of cross-border payments” he says, with his arms punctuating his words. “If governments give you trouble repatriating funds, we can provide a solution. We settle in fiat. Banks will take a cut, they may take a long time, maybe you can’t do it at all. But we can. We have identified the problem.”
These are the three people we spoke to. Sanja, Antonin and Nikita. They seem to embody Utrust, and in their voices you see exactly why this company feels like it can take over the world.
“Crossborder payments are a major problem. People don’t understand how they can enter this market. Freelancers, companies, they always have issues sending money abroad” adds Sanja. Listening to Sanja speak about taking the steps to fixing one of the greatest financial inconveniences the world has known since coins were made of gold and silver is quite an experience. She speaks of this with a calm and containment that would lead you to believe this is all in a day’s work.
“Which countries? What kind of businesses? How to do invoicing? Are competitors doing this? How is everyone else doing it, and how do we fix problems?” Nikita brings a different vibe altogether. He’s all energy, all drive, and if ever there were any doubts that this could be achieved, they most certainly didn’t come from him.
“We were pretty quick in figuring out expectations about this product. I was there for the technical aspect. By monday afternoon, the designer had created half of the flow, and on our side we had been working on a prototype from the beginning.” says Antonin, his brightness permeating his every word. He knows how things get made, and he relishes in making them.
“By now, I am 100% convinced that companies will have to incorporate a new way of hiring and collaborating across teams.”
Creating this solution took exactly three days, and it took work from every department in the company. The idea of the hackathon was to get the leadership team, the CEO, COO, head of product, head of engineering, head of service design, everyone, in the same room, get some beers, and work it out.
No room.
No beers.
No problem. Apparently.
“Initially, I would’ve liked to have done it in person. But we had to go totally remote. This is our new reality, and we are embracing it. By now, I am 100% convinced that companies will have to incorporate a new way of hiring and collaborating across teams. This is something we are already doing now, and we are very happy with the way we have figured out how to use online wireframes to share information” says Sanja.
By lunchtime on Monday, the whole team had succeeded in creating a jobs to be done statement, and everyone got to work. By the end of the day ideation was complete, and the team had a serviceable model.
Nikita drew it by hand.
“Let me tell you something, I’ve been doing product management for twenty years, and still the most efficient way of prototyping is pen and paper” he says, displaying the picture he took of his notebook that got sent to everyone on the team.
The result of about a week of work should be a rough design, a budget, features and notes about them, but not really a prototype. “70% of work was done by Tuesday. Most of it will be unusable. Parts will be salvaged, and the base structure, with adjustments. Maybe half, if it withstands testing. This is going out of our comfort zone.” says Antonin. But he’s smiling while he says it. He knows how impressive the work is. He just wants to keep people’s expectations in check. Nothing leaves his hands before he can make absolutely sure that the software is of the highest quality and security that he can possibly make it.
“There is a social aspect to this kind of work. We have lunch together, we celebrate together when we are done.”
“By Wednesday we ran into a couple of roadblocks, but nothing that we couldn’t fix. By 3, 4 PM we had everything together that was working from A to Z. Thursday, early morning, we wanted to show something nice, and we finished some small improvements and style issues.” says Antonin.
By Thursday morning, the team had created a prototype. Sanja won’t quickly admit this, but not even she believed that this could be done. It was presented to the whole team. It was exactly what they had set out to do.
“I had done something like this before” says Antonin. “We built a small radio-controlled car, navigated it and managed to drive it without seeing where it was. We rented a cottage in the mountains, got a keg of beer, and spent the whole weekend as developers together trying to build something. Needless to say, this was very different.”
“There is a social aspect to this kind of work” says Sanja. “We have lunch together, we celebrate together when we are done.”
There are mixed feelings from the team at times. They are thrilled at their success, of course. When the first of Utrust’s most trusted customers got to see the working prototype, they responded with “that’s exactly what we need!” But there is a lingering feeling that whilst Utrust is definitely making the new remote reality a success, these people really do miss each other.
And that’s why, when the dust settles, when mainstream adoption of digital currencies is achieved, and when we wake up to a world where the money of the future is the money of the present, Utrust will still be leading, still ahead of the curve.
And you can be right there with them, ahead of your competition. Join Utrust here.
