Onboarding a client is onboarding a team
When you join a company, someone shows you where things live and who to ask. We expect the same of ourselves in…
Process
22 Articles
The maintenance mindset
Nobody writes case studies about the outage that didn't happen. We'd like to say a word for the quiet work.
Small rooms make big decisions
Every person added to a meeting subtracts something from the decision. There's a better way to be inclusive than a calendar invite.
Handoff is a myth
The baton pass from strategy to design to development looks clean on a process diagram. Batons don't carry context. People do.
The second project is the real one
Project one is a first date where everyone remembered to iron their shirt. The interesting part starts after.
Post-mortems without blame
A retro where everyone is polite is a retro where nobody learned anything. Getting the truth into the room is a design…
Write the launch email first
If the announcement can't be drafted on day one, the problem isn't the copywriting. The project doesn't know what it is yet.
The client is not the bottleneck
Before blaming the approver for a stalled approval, look at what got sent. Five stakeholders, no deadline, and a "thoughts?" is not…
Estimates are forecasts, not promises
The single number sounds confident. The range is telling the truth. One of them blows up the relationship around week nine.
The status meeting is a smell
A recurring meeting where nothing gets decided isn't communication. It's a weekly ceremony to confirm the project still exists.
Full-service, actually
Every agency claims full-service. Here's the difference between a long list of services and one team that never loses the thread.
Feedback is a skill
Good notes describe the problem. Bad notes prescribe the fix. The difference decides whether revisions make the work better or just different.