Why do I think Ways We Work has been successful?
It’s very surreal to be in the driver’s seat of something like Ways We Work. You see the growth and the evolution but unlike the rest of the world you also see every attempt to push the needle just a little farther — both successful ones and unsuccessful. The failures can be big, but they can also be more subtle. Every ignored email, each interview or team visit that didn’t turn out quite as you’d hoped, each month you don’t feel you did enough to push the bar higher. It’s the stuff no one sees, the stuff you try not to reflect on as you move onto the next thing. Reflection of any kind can seem scary when you just want to keep moving, to keep going. So I often find myself relishing in the praise of others who don’t see the messy bits. They’re in awe of the way the site has grown, how the interviews have evolved, the trust we have from those we interview and the community we have built.
More than once we’ve heard, “there is no other site like Ways We Work.” It is without a doubt the best praise we could possibly receive for so many reasons. It means we’re providing something that wasn’t there before, it means my original goal of filling a knowledge gap for myself — is being achieved for thousands of others too. While hearing that is wonderful I often wonder, “how? How are we achieving this? Why is it successful?” I mean, couldn’t anyone ask similar questions? Produce similar interviews? Produce a similar site?
Currently I find myself not just in a place where I want to reflect on how Ways We Work has been successful, but in a place where I have to in order to ensure that success not only continues but grows. So I’m going to lean on the praise that others have made and reflect on how I think we’ve achieved those successes.
A mission
From the day I started Ways We Work there has always been a mission behind it. That mission has grown, it has evolved, but there has always been a purpose. We don’t create content for the sake of creating content, or for getting millions of hits. While that stuff would likely make our lives a whole lot more comfortable, it cannot come at the cost of the mission. Ways We Work came from my own desire to learn and understand how others were navigating their careers — from the high-level of figuring out what kind of work they loved doing to the nitty gritty of what tools and what processes they were using to get the job done. As it’s grown we’ve dug deeper on the realities of doing meaningful work with the goal of empowering others to do their own meaningful work. Some days we may be more successful at accomplishing that than others but the fact that we are clear about what is driving us permeates everything that we do. People enjoy reading content, but people can get behind a mission.
Trust
The trust that Ways We Work has gained as a brand comes from our integrity to stick to our mission. It permeates what we do from every angle. When we reach out to interview someone, they trust that we are going to do a good job of representing them. We aren’t out for a story, we’re not looking for an angle — we just want to showcase them authentically and give them a space to share their skills and success but also a space they can be vulnerable enough to share their challenges and weaknesses. Readers trust that every time we share a new piece of content, it’s going to be worth reading. They know we’re not out to suck up a few minutes of their valuable time without them gaining something valuable in return.
Community
Building community online is a bit of an abstract thing and it can be hard to understand how exactly that is done. For Ways We Work the most simple answer is that we have a community because we have a mission. Sure, some people might come for one particular person we’re interviewing but the people that keep coming back, come back because of the two points above: trust and a mission. They trust that the content we put out is going to be worth their time and they relate to the mission we’re working towards. Our community is dispersed across timezones, across channels, and even across languages — but trust and a strong mission are understood globally.
Consistency
The best advice I could give to anyone wanting to start a project similar to Ways We Work would be to be consistent. From the very start we have published a new interview every Wednesday morning. That has happened without fail since the first interview went up. The number of people who execute on their ideas is small, the number of people who continue to execute on them for a year, for two years is even smaller. There is so much value in just sticking with it. In the early days when no one is reading yet, it’s important to understand why you’re doing it and why it’s important to you. Be consistent and as long as you still love what you’re doing, keep going.
So why Ways We Work has been successful can’t be answered with one thing, it can’t even be answered fully with these three points. But every element above connects everything that we do. We have high standards for the content we produce because we know we have people’s trust. We improve our interview skills, we build the trust that people already have in Ways We Work, so that the content we produce lives up to the high standards that we have. We have a mission because we genuinely care about the work we’re doing. We’re curious and we’re passionate because this is the work that we find meaningful.
