We're here. We did it. We're here in the same room. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to see all of you. I keep like right now I'm like looking out and I'm seeing faces. I haven't said hi to yet. I'm very excited. Very excited to be here. I also was really looking forward to Cyrus's talk on internal linking and I can't wait for the blog post. But today I'm going to talk to you about building remote culture that actually feels like a culture. So as Rob mentioned, UpBuild has been fully remote, fully distributed since day one. It's a core part of our identity as an agency. I think it's a core part of what allows us to do the things that we do. And a reality that I think many people in this room and across the globe are facing right now is that remote work is here to stay. We are not putting those bubbles back in the bottle. Can't happen. A lot of people during the Pando were like wow I actually don't need to go to the office and I love I'm here. I control the thermostat. I got my soft pants on. I pet my dog whenever I want. It is a good life. And a lot of business owners were like wow we are not paying rent and internet and phones and snacks and toner and janitorial. Our overhead gets real low. Real nice and low. I like this. Not everybody's on board with this but the fact is that remote work is here to stay. And one of the things that a lot of people are facing as they are either transitioning to being fully remote or building a new company that's fully remote is figuring out how to build their company culture without all being in the same place. So what do we mean by company culture? You think about company culture. You might think about things like you have foosball table. You have free snacks. You have a dress code that's business casual. It's casual. It's formal. You might have how you do meetings. You might have corporate values. You might have all of these different things and these are portions of your company culture. It's true. But really your company culture is more than that. If your team is a fish. If your team members are fish. Company culture is the water that they swim through. You can kind of think of company culture very similarly to the way that you would think about building a brand externally. Your brand is everything your customers or your users experience while interacting with your company. Good or bad. All of it is part of that. Same with company culture. It's every piece of your team's experience of working at your business. And that is going to include things that you don't control. And it's definitely going to include things that you didn't do on purpose. But it is all part of your company culture. And when you are managing a remote team that becomes a lot more important to do intentionally. When you're in person at an office a lot of company culture just kind of happens. For better or for worse. There are certainly offices that I have worked at where everyone being in one place together is creating a company culture that's probably not what anybody's trying to build. But for better or for worse you don't necessarily have to be as intentional about building culture and creating culture when you are in an office. I would argue very strenuously that you should be as intentional in person as you are remote. But it's a lot easier to get away with not doing that. Because everyone's in the same place. Everyone's experience is going to be much more the same as everybody else's because you're all in the same place. You're all in the same office. You're all going to the same happy hour.    But when you are a remote worker you're alone. You're in your house. There are not as many built in moments of connection. Not just with other members of your team but with the business with the company itself.  And so when you are managing a remote team or a hybrid team it becomes much more important to work intentionally to build company culture. In person if you don't build company culture it will build itself for better or for worse. Remote if you don't build company culture it just won't exist. And without a strong feeling of connection to your business when people feel like freelancers or contractors instead of part of your team they're much more likely to churn. They're not connected to what you're doing. They don't have buy-in to your larger vision. And in this in this economy oh my god you can't afford that. The great resignation is real. You need to be thinking about how you are creating a place where people want to be part of the team. So the question that you need to ask yourself when you're starting to think about building company culture is what does it feel like to work here? And what do we want it to feel like to work here? When we think of someone's experience of working at this business what do we want that to be like? And as a leader you should already know the answer to this. If you don't then before you do anything else you need to figure that out. Because building culture has a lot in common with brand building. We as marketers have an advantage when it comes to building culture because a lot of us know how to define and build a brand. So a lot of brand building exercises are also great culture building exercises. You can do a card sorting exercise. What are the attributes of our internal brand of our company culture? Is it casual? Is it formal? Is it playful? Is it serious? What is our vision? What is our mission? What are our values? Now when you're asking yourself what are your corporate values I would encourage you to be really really honest with yourself or if you are not the leader of the team but you know the person is be really honest with them. Because so many companies say that they have company values and then don't live them. When you say one thing and you do another as the leadership of a company that feeling of what does it feel like to live here becomes cognitive dissonance. When people are saying oh we really prioritize innovation and playfulness and thoughtfulness and what we actually prioritize is making money and doing the things the same way that they've always been done and no one comes into the boss's office and complains to them. That starts to be a disparate experience from what is said and what is lived. So be brutally honest with yourself. One great way to play it to start is what's more important to you than revenue? What are the things that you would say we cannot take on this additional revenue because it does not adhere with the following values? That teaches you where you live. What's more important to you than money? That's what you value. If the answer is nothing then think about what are the things that you value most that are going to make you the most money. But really be honest. Think about how you are going to define that internal brand and then again in the same way that you would do brand building build a brand strategy ask where can we create and reinforce that feeling? So again your team is the fish company culture is the water there are parts of it you can't control there are parts of it that they are going to experience that you didn't do on purpose but when especially when you're mapping out a remote team you have a huge opportunity to look at the touch points that each of your team members has as the experience working for and with you and optimize that to create the culture that you want. So in much the same way that you would do with your customers in your brand where are the touch points that we can reinforce our team culture and here are a few that I found to be really important in the last six years of managing a remote team. A big one is hiring when you are managing a remote team you need to hire so carefully because you're never seeing this person in person. There are two people that I work with right now that I've literally never met. There's another person I work with who I didn't meet for more than two years because of the pandemic. You need to hire carefully and you need to be looking for some of the specific skills that someone in a remote workplace needs more than someone in an in-person workplace might need. So this is my team at UpBuild. Oh look at them I love them so much. At UpBuild it takes us about two months to hire. From the first app for the first time we post a job opportunity all the way through to the offer letter from the first time we interact with somebody I should say the first time somebody applies to hiring that person takes about two months and over the course of that we look at a lot of different kinds of things. We interview them we look at their resume you know hiring but we also conduct part of the interview process over Slack because every single day the number one way that we speak to each other is over Slack so how can somebody communicate in the communication methods that you use the most when that's not talking that becomes really important. Same thing with email I actually have people do some homework for me and write an email write an email as though you're writing an email to a client telling them that you messed something up and what you're going to do to fix it. Write an email as though you're writing something to a client who has gotten a fact very wrong and is about to make a bad choice because of it. How are you communicating in the ways that someone in this role needs to communicate and then we also have every single person on the team interview people before we hire them and you know it's little it's short interviews it's just a getting to know you want to be respectful of everybody's time as we scale we're almost certainly not going to be able to do this we can't do this with 100 people right now we have nine people we can do that but think about the people who are going to be half have to work closely with this person because communication becomes so much more important and if they're not jiving if they're not communicating if somebody's not picking up what somebody else is putting down that becomes a problem a lot faster with remote hiring than it does in person. So we've hired this person now comes the crucial moment when it comes to building culture and that is onboarding how many I'm not gonna I hate when speakers ask people to raise their hands and I almost did it I'm sorry um but many many people in this room I'm sure have started a job and you get there on your first day and it's clear that no one has thought about what you're gonna do on your first day like you get there HR they know what to do like here's the handbook here's the forms watch this sexual harassment training video I need a copy of your social security number card like HR has an unlock you get to your manager and they're like oh right you're starting today here's your desk and that's your first day you can't do that with remote work when somebody is starting for you and showing up to work is just turning on their computer you need to set expectations really well and really clearly because otherwise they're going to get to work they're not going to know what to do and that feels bad and they can't just look around be like hey guys what should I be doing because no one's there so when we have somebody who's starting on their first day we build an agenda for them not just for their first day but for their first week every minute is not accounted for but for the first week we make sure that they have meetings set up that they've been invited to everything that's another thing make sure that people are invited to meetings because they're not going to see everybody getting up and going to the meeting that you forgot to invite them to be like hey should I be part of that they're at home by themselves minding their own business triple check they're invited to the meetings that need to be invited to and also set up time for them to meet with people so one of the things that we do at UpBuild which is great for a lot of reasons is we share in the work of out of onboarding we have different team members take a new person through our key deliverables through our core processes through the tools that we use this is great for us as managers because it's much less time consuming it's also great for the person being onboarded and for the rest of the team because it provides them a built-in way right up front where they're having in-depth one-on-one conversations about the work that we do with this new person it's a great way to for people to get to know each other it's a great way for people to start to understand how they're going to work together so meetings with everybody when we think about optimizing touch points again this goes back to brand marketing any kind of written material that you have is an opportunity to reinforce your culture and that includes things like your team member handbook it includes things like the the forms you fill out and the documentation that you have of your processes anywhere where you can add in that specific internal culture brand whatever and you can define these the what are what is your brand voice when it comes to your company culture is it informal is it playful is it serious is it super businessy is it you know whatever that thing is incorporate that tone consistently throughout these pieces of what become essentially internal marketing collateral and branding collateral for your team so that they're having again going back to that idea of cognitive dissonance they're having a consistent experience of what your company culture is and that is consistent with what you say it is so our team member handbook is written it's all written in this very conversational style there are parts of our team member handbook that are not written in that style because they were written by a lawyer and they have to stay that way and when we have those we have a little known from the CEO that says hey this next part was written by a lawyer and it has to be this way so that's why it's different um so that people don't read that legally as part and say oh is this actually how the company secretly is is very legally and contractee and everything else was just a smoke smoke screen no the lawyer said we had to do it that way and that's why we pay them so that's why it's the way that it is and every time you onboard you can get better with this every time you onboard you can read look at all of your marketing collateral your handbook your documentation your processes all of the things that you go over with people when they first start take a minute because your company culture is going to evolve over time and it's really easy to not update that stuff because you're not thinking about it onboarding provides you a nice regular cadence with which to check in with yourself and the team about company culture and make sure that those important initial touch points are reinforcing the kind of culture that you want to be creating another thing that we do which is not talking to remote workers i'm given to understand that this is not popular we require everybody to be on video for calls and meetings we just do like you know it's fine if you're in a t-shirt you might want to brush your hair you can always put in a hat but we do find that that face-to-face communication with a fully remote team is super important in terms of actually building those connections and we have also found that with our clients it has a huge impact on client retention when we are face-to-face on video calls and meetings so not everybody likes it i really recommend requiring video in meetings so now your teams there they're onboarded now we're going to manage them and this is the number one question that i got when we the pandemic first started and everybody was struggling to figure out how to go remote is oh my gosh ruth you've been doing this for years how do you know your team's actually working if you can't see what they're doing how do you know that they're doing the right things you can't see them how do you know that they haven't left the house for hours how do you know that they aren't taking a nap or watching tv and our tracking is important there are a lot of different tools that you can use for time tracking we use ever hour they're a bunch of other other ones on here and a huge amount of them out in the marketplace we track time for a few reasons i want to know if somebody's not working enough because it might mean that they don't have enough to do i want to make sure nobody's working too much because if they burn out then they'll quit and i don't want that i need to make sure that the amount of time we spend on a deliverable is more or less the amount of time that we're getting paid to spend on it so that we're providing value to our clients and not losing money on projects that is the level of detail that you need in order to run a team but there is one weird trick that you can use to figure out whether or not your team is actually doing work while they're remote if you don't have a way to see whether or not work is getting done that is not remote works problem that is a management problem uh and you know what if somebody's watching a movie while they're working what if somebody takes half an hour to go watch walk their dog while they're working what if somebody's getting in late later than they're supposed to or leaving earlier than they're supposed to like a lot of this stuff i don't care what if they're watching a movie i don't care is the work getting done is it getting done to the standard that we need it to get done are people where they're supposed to be when they need to be there are they available when they're supposed to be available yes then i don't care if you take 30 minutes out of the minute out of the middle of the day to eat a sandwich and then you don't add that 30 minutes back on at the end of the day but all your work got done i don't care i don't have time to care i'm very busy so you need to make sure as a manager that you have a way to understand whether or not the work is getting done to the standard that you needed to get done and that's what you need to care about resist the temptation to micromanage your employees because you can't see them they hate it and it's a waste of everyone's time now when you're planning for somebody's workload i like to plan for about 30 minutes of non-billable time for every 60 minutes of billable time just because somebody now does not have to commute does not mean that they're suddenly banging out 40 billable hours a week or at least they shouldn't be because they're going to burn out and you need to provide ways for them to track non-billable time to things like learning and email and meetings but what you don't want for somebody to be spending an hour every day on time tracking because you paid them for that hour and it was not efficiently used what if instead they took that hour and did something that they enjoyed and returned to work the next day refreshed what about that how would that be the last thing i want to talk about is building a team who knows that they're a team so this is something that i actually had to go on a bit of a learning journey as i became a manager because the thing is as a manager i talk to everyone all the time i talk to the team all the time i have one-on-ones with everybody every week i'm in client meetings with them i'm in sales meetings with them i am a manager and a lot of what i do is go to meetings that is not true for the practitioners on our team and it can be really easy to unintentionally isolate them from each other which makes them less connected to each other it goes back to the idea of what does it feel like to work here it also makes them feel less like a team it makes them less likely to share information and insights and knowledge with each other as an agency that's one of the best things about working at an agency is working with other people who do the things that you do and i know there are some in-house people in here who felt that really hard and like i empathize with that but when you are working with a team you should have the benefit of that so you need to as a leader create an environment where that's possible and easy part of how we create an environment where everybody feels like they actually work at the office is we give people money to build their home out to make their home office the way that they want everybody at upbuild gets 500 bucks a year for a home office allowance and that can be anything people use it to paint their office people have gotten plants people have gotten wireless speaker systems you can stack your home office allowance i stacked it for three years and got a new laptop whatever the thing is that you need to make your office the way that you want to have it this is the kind of thing it's very easy for a company to offer especially if it's reimbursable because then it's not a whole tax situation but also it is just it's such an easy way for your team to know that you feel appreciated so that you're not like oh your monitor sucks that is too bad here have some money fix it and over time you get to see people like they get to create the space that they want that's the beauty of remote work you're at home in your own space buy into some of the advantages of remote work by helping people make their home space the way that they want it to be another thing we do to foster those points of connection so going back to this idea there's no water cooler there's no coffee breaks people don't have to talk to each other so make them talk to each other this is a something that buffer has been doing for years buffer you know of course hugely influential in the world of building remote culture um they have a pair call they do it every day because they have a bigger team we do it twice a week twice a week everybody at upbuild is paired up with somebody else at upbuild they have to have a 15 minute conversation twice in that week that is not about work it can be about anything you want it doesn't have to but it doesn't it shouldn't be about work that's a great way to get people to socialize during the pandemic we actually introduced the the option to opt out of that because it's like how you've been doing bad what do you do this weekend nothing um not great but uh it is a way to get people to talk to each other we also use slack every wednesday we have a water cooler wednesday question it's just a random question that i come up with and uh we all to discuss it this is uh last wednesday so it was uh you wake up in the last tv show you watch how's that doing it's going great for me because i'm on jeopardy with remote work you have this enormous opportunity for the first time to be super flexible about where you work and when you work and building in elements of your company culture that don't encourage that are going to take away from the benefits that remote work provides and are probably going to result in some of your team who really wanted to work remotely going somewhere else one thing that we do at upbuild as we have office hours so 9 a.m to 2 30 p.m pacific which for me in Oklahoma City is 11 a.m to 4 30 p.m those are office hours any meeting that we have is going to be during that time that's when we expect people to be available on slack so when we expect people to be responsive via email if i need to get a hold of you during that time i expect to be able to do it within a reasonable interval of time because i can't just go by your desk what that means if some of you are doing the math you may notice that this doesn't add up to 40 hours a week or even 35 hours a week which is really more what we aim for what this allows people to do is have some consistency to know that their team will be there when they need them and then to structure the rest of their life however they want so i have a colleague on the west coast he's a real morning person i'm really not which means that he and i start work at the same time every day 7 a.m pacific 9 a.m central and that kind of flexibility he gets to do his work when he's thinking best in the morning i get to not try to work before i start having thoughts which is around 9 a.m and and you know it's same at the end of the day and it creates all this flexibility where you don't have to think oh i have a doctor's appointment do i need to take pto can i just go to who i need to know just schedule it for outside of office hours and then show it for office hours as a leader especially in a remote team you need to think about the examples that you're setting when you're communicating again i would argue that this applies to everybody but especially with a remote team remote work is about trust all work is about trust remote work is especially about trust you need to show your team that you trust them to get their work done and in return they need to demonstrate that you can trust them to get their work done that means you're not micromanaging that means you're not checking in all the time and nitpicking their hours it means you are helping them do their best work and when they get stuck you are helping them get unstuck this creates a feeling it's real real common easy called psychological safety psychological safety not a new concept this is from an academic paper from 1999 you shall read psychological safety in the workplace is the idea that the team is not going to embarrass reject or punish someone from speaking up and this in the time that i have been leading remote teams is the thing that i have to train people out of the hardest the idea that if you have a problem you need to tell me i want you to tell me if you don't know what to do you need to tell me you need to ask the team i want you to ask the team i'm not going to attack you the team's not going to attack you i'm not going to think less of you i'm not going to make a little mental note oh so-and-so doesn't know what that is and they really showed at their level oh if they don't know it then i'm going to help them know it that's my job a lot a lot of businesses are not doing this studies have shown studies have shown 1999 this is from 20 years ago um i was in high school when this paper came out it's been a minute studies have shown over and over and over and over that psychological safety is a great indicator of overall productivity people do better work when they know that they can be vulnerable when they know that their team has their back when they know they can ask questions and get answers if something is going to take you nine hours of googling to figure out or one question on slack to figure out guess which one i would rather pay for as the person who signs your pay checks it's you asking a question and getting an answer from people you can trust who trusts you think of the example that you're setting experience ego death it's hard you can do it as the leader you of all people need to be making yourself vulnerable you of all people need to be leading by example saying hey i'm stuck i don't know how to do this have you ever seen this before oh i noticed this is this new or just have i not seen it suddenly people also ask answers are a lot less prevalent is that just me or is this actually happening what are you seeing i'm stuck on a client oh we did this thing for this client when you have a team that truly trusts each other and feels safe you can do amazing things and share amazing knowledge and something to remember when you're managing a remote team asking questions in writing is so much harder than doing it in person when somebody can't lean across the cubicle and say hey i i don't understand this can you explain it to me that's easy it's secret when somebody has to type it out into the slack channel and everyone at the company can read it even typing out a slack dm and you see your words it's like your imposter syndrome just slapping you in the face it's hard so you as a leader need to create a space where people can be vulnerable where you know that people aren't going to be attacked because you're not going to attack them because if somebody else does you're going to shut that down where people help each other and want to help each other this is the most important thing that you can do when it comes to building remote culture is create that feeling of psychological safety because they're not seeing it in your face they're not hearing it in your voice even if it's even if you are speaking over video they're not in your presence every day to build at the trust so you as a leader need to show them that it is okay to be vulnerable by making yourself vulnerable yourself by praising and rewarding and high-fiving and calling out like hey there was really great question asking on that call or hey i love how you didn't know what to do and you took it to the team you found a good solution you worked together that was great that's what i want that's what i want to see because then what's going to happen is next time that person has a problem they're going to ask you and you're going to help them solve it and they're going to learn and you're going to do great work and you're going to make more money and they're going to love working for you and then they keep working for you and make more money it's like one of those flywheels marketers are always talking about have you seen this who wrote this whole thing the last thing i will say is that with remote work you have to be diligent about boundaries everyone loves boundaries did you know this everyone loves boundaries they may not know it but they do when people know what to expect from you and when it makes you very relaxing to be around so with remote work that work life balance now i am at work now i am at home it's both all the time how do you create those divisions how can you lead your team in creating those divisions for me i go in my office i close the door i had a conversation with my husband six years ago when i started this job that said if i was working in an office i would not be cleaning the house or doing laundry during the day because i wouldn't be here so i cannot do chores during the day because i'm not at home i'm at work not everybody needs that help your team figure out where those boundaries are and more importantly help your team stop work help your team draw a line for themselves where they are no longer at work where they are not working a little bit all the time and feeling like they're simultaneously always working and not working hard enough help your team work when they work stop when they stop and up build we do things like if you honestly want to work in the evening or on the weekend because that's how your life is set up and it makes your life better to do that i encourage that i don't want our clients to know i don't want our clients to know that they can email you at nine nine pm and get an answer or email you on saturday and get an answer i want you to have that time available to you it's outside of office hours you do not have to be responsive if you want to answer emails just schedule them to go out at the beginning of office hours um if you get on slack when you take pto at up build i will all caps yell at you to go away you have to do these things it becomes even more important with a remote workforce because it's so easy to just work a little bit all the time and that is again how your team burns out so you can help them set good boundaries by setting good boundaries yourself and encouraging them to do the same these are just some of the many ways that you can create a remote team that loves their jobs believes in their workplace and is all bought into a common mission that's the kind of thing at up build everyone has been there for more than two years except the people who started in april we have people at up build who have been here for five six seven years since day one they're still there employee retention it's so much cheaper to keep a good person that it is to keep hiring and experienced ones do this now build your company culture now and you will be seeing the ROI on that decision for years and years and years thanks everybody


I'm back! Hey everybody, I'm Sandy Alnach. Welcome to 2024. I have returned from my rather non-sebatical sabbatical. I am terrible at sabbaticaling because I think what you're supposed to do is unplug from the world and go read a lot of books, sit on a beach, take some naps. I don't know something other than work hard but that doesn't seem to be my role. I had two goals during the sabbatical, one of which was to finish some commissions. I had eight of them to do and you'll see some footage of a couple of them in this video as we talk about New Year's resolutions. The other thing I wanted to do was finish off my sketch-a-day sketchbook from Lake Michigan Bookpress. I'm about 10 pages from finished and I plan on finishing by next weekend and I'll tell you why in a little bit later in this video. I can't believe it took me like three years I think to finish that sketchbook but anyway I digress because I wanted to talk today a little bit about New Year's resolutions. I don't normally make them but I think I found a few that I can tolerate and maybe there'll be ones that'll help you as well so let's get started. New Year's resolutions tend to focus me on all the things that are wrong with me. Shed this thing, stop doing that thing, start the other thing that I don't want to do and I know that I'm not going to follow through with no matter how determined I am on January 1st. All of that just leads me to feeling bad about myself and go to something I want to kick to the curb so I'm focusing on six things that are going to make me happy in the life that I already have. First one is very, very simple. The other night I accidentally dropped off my slippers next to the heat register in the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth and when I woke up the next morning and went to put my slippers on they were right next to the heat register, they were toasty warm and I have been doing this every night and those toasty toes in the morning get me out of bed. I just can't wait to get my slippers on so that's a simple one. Number two is creative celebrations. I want to celebrate more holidays. On Saturday here on YouTube I'm going to be celebrating Cuddle Up Day so bring yourself a cup of coffee and we'll talk about that. I also want to do things like Flamingo my friend's yard for her birthday because she loves flamingos and that also means I need to find a good source for plastic flamingos if you've got one. I'm looking for cheap flamingos. I have celebrated silly holidays a bit throughout my life but I want to be more intentional and at the start of each month I'm going to look up what's coming and plan something maybe real life maybe online maybe YouTube who knows but I just want to make my life more fun. Number three for every art rejection that I get for every negative comment from a troll when things go wrong with my website or I send out an email and the link is the wrong one and I get everybody yelling at me I'm going to start a little list I'm going to score points every time things come at me to try to make me feel bad and every time I level up like a little video game of my very own I get to shop for art supplies and that way I will cheer on the next door who tries to bring me down I'll be one step closer to shopping. Number four is more watercolor it's my favorite medium my happy place and on my Patreon I'm going to be doing something a little different this year I'm going to be adding something new for the $10 and up folks it's going to be something that maybe some of you thought I already did one real-time watercolor painting every month including the reference photo and sketch and it'll be a narrated video so it'll be like a little watercolor subscription class the reason I haven't done a lot of teaching on my Patreon is because my patrons have told me over the years they don't have time to watch more video from me and I've instead done little short videos two to four minutes just giving them updates on things or a little sneak peek at something instead of that I'm going to switch over and start doing these watercolor sessions and that might get more of them to watch some of it and maybe it'll bring some more of you into the community as well so if you'd like something like that then join in as a $10 and up patron now there's also something for the $1 and up folks this coming weekend I am going to post as a video for them a giant flip through of my 365 page sketch a day sketchbook and I'm not posting it here on YouTube for the whole world because like there's not that many people who want to sit through quite that much of just flipping pages I'm not going to be talking through I'm just going to put some music on but if you're interested in seeing that then this coming weekend that will be there so that brings me to number five which is I want to focus on figure drawing more I have been in a life drawing group every Thursday for a few years but honestly I've noticed lately I'm not making all that much progress I'm definitely making some but I realize why that is it's because I only do it once a week after me griping at everybody else about regularly practicing you would think I'd have realized this a long time ago but yes teachers speak to yourself just this weekend I already started I did a marathon life drawing session on zoom with artists around the world and I'm going to need a serious nap to recover it started on Sunday at 2 a.m. and went till 4 p.m. my time and it was exhausting and fun and exhilarating and I am just so excited about improving my skills even just that much drawing made a difference in one day so my goal is to dive in deeper on figure drawing and see if I can finally learn how to draw hands and feet without panicking every single time and now for the big one which is number six breaking up with social media I am so done with expecting these platforms to care about art and artists and it's time for me to get more creative in reaching out to my tribe and in ways that are also going to make me happier because my work life will be easier so I recommend you pick one of these anyone you want some of you are going to want more than one first you could join my broadcast channel on instagram it's on my instagram page when you're on your phone or tablet a big link to something that's called for now creating something every day it's a direct message channel that I can send a link to my tutorials on and it will never be blocked by the algorithm it will always be in your direct messages every Tuesday and Saturday secondly you could subscribe to my newsletter last year I turned my automated blog subscription thing into a very nice newsletter but I didn't really tell anybody about it except for the subscribers well now I'm telling you so starting next week not this week but next week it's going to become a once a week newsletter on Saturdays rather than two a week so you're going to get double the content in one spot but less emails plus there's all kinds of bonus stuff in a newsletter I'm going to be throwing in subscriber specials bonus tips behind the scene things and I'm working on an e-book that's going to come out later this year and subscribers will get to see it first and now is a great time to jump on that now if you don't want email do me a favor and just tap the bell while you're here on youtube beside the subscribe button and tell it to send you all the videos not personalize but all the videos and then make sure you have your notifications turned on because then you won't miss anything and when there's a new class like the one coming up this next weekend I'll always tell you in a video so as long as you keep up with this you're going to be up to date and if you're sick to death of algorithms as well then just join our adventure it's a community of artists on mighty networks and we are just having a blast there every time I have a tutorial here on youtube I post the video there along with a backstory bit of chatter like what inspired it something I learned from it whatever plus we're going to be having monthly zooms there like we just had a super fun zoom studio session last week and it was just a blast I'm going to be creating some bonus videos that are expanding on ideas in a bunch of my classes and posting them there on art venture so there's going to be a way to learn more on that platform in 2024 now while I'm still on number five the breaking up with social media I also want to let you know I'm completely divorcing sub-stack after only being with them for a few months now they decided they have no standards they're letting literal Nazis like in the year of our lord 2024 literal Nazis can post on their site and make money from it from all that vile content so I am moving my daily sketches to my fine art site so if you'd like to subscribe to daily content and all you get is a sketch and a caption like it's not an in-depth thing but you'll get it every day when you subscribe I'll send you a list of tips also for starting your own daily sketch habit and there's a little coupon code in there for new subscribers too so all of this is going to make my life happier by simplifying my social media leave me a comment in the doobly-doo and tell me what your ideas are for happiness makers for the new year's resolution season because I could use a few more for my list things that are going to make me smile in 2024 I will see you again in a couple of days with another video and maybe you want to have a cup of coffee for that one I'm just going to recommend that you bring a cup of coffee with you all right I will see you then take care bye


So today I'm going to talk about my design journey and I'm going to cover a couple of things. I'm going to start with my first commercial digital project and then go into all of the various sort of design setups I've worked in and what I kind of learnt from each setup. Of course this is like my journey so hopefully some of it is going to be useful to you guys. Let me quickly introduce myself. I'm the head of design and UX at Referral Candy which is a Singapore based startup and we basically make automated referral programs for any e-commerce store. In my former role I was the VP design at Postman which I'm sure some of you have heard of hopefully. It's basically an API service for developers and basically we helped a postman grow to more than four million developers and still growing and it's a massive platform now. So let's just quickly start off. I call it level zero which is like my first commercial digital project. I was trained as a graphic designer which is like in print and the moment I went into the industry I decided I don't want to do print and so my first project was actually a commercial project that I convinced my boss that I really can do website design even though I had never done it before. So yeah the first story is this website that I made. It's a bit embarrassing to show it but it was basically a website for a mall and what I did was I created abstract forms and then I was very interested and excited about interaction and interactive stuff. So the top half of the website is an interactive experience which you can click through and the bottom half is just the normal website that the client wanted. So I think after this project what I learnt was if the client likes it then all good, it's approved, it goes live and that was I think my first learning in the design industry. The other thing I think that started happening was that I worked in a lot of design studios and just keep in mind this is really long ago, this is like ten years ago. So design studios are just lovely places of like six to eight designers. Everybody is a designer, it's a really comfortable cozy sort of space. The person who owns the company is also a designer so you are just in this amazing place where you can just focus on the craft, on the pixels, on the print. You are very protected in a design studio. So I really learnt a lot from design studios because I had time and space to develop my own style. A lot of design studios have their own style already because the founder's style is kind of imprinted on the studio. So I think what I realised was hey as a designer you can have your own style, you don't have to do everything the client tells you to do and I started to explore this sort of geometric style that I had. This is a branding project I did for Diamond Company, it's very random but I think I had a lot of fun with it and by this point I was doing everything from logo design, print design, web, like end to end kind of brand application. And so I think the story I want to tell about studio is this one project I did where we worked with this lady who wanted to start her own event conference in India and that was a pretty huge thing because in those days it was very new, TED was very new and it was supposed to be a TEDx which she wanted to brand. And it was super fun and I think it's the first time where I really saw how important it was for the whole team to work really well together, the client really in it, 150%, the designers in it, everybody was really in it. And this is the logo that I made which again was developing my personal style which is a sort of geometric retro kind of style as a graphic designer and it was really interesting to see that being converted into something like this on the stage and this event is still going on now after all of these years and they're still developing the brand even now and even after I left that studio I still saw the way the logo was continuing to be used and that made me realize as a designer that if you do your job well, if you write the vision statement well, if you do all of that initial branding and initial stuff well, it goes on, it doesn't die after you go. And so that was like a really great learning experience for me. So what did I learn from working in design studios? Presentation skills are everything. Of course this is something I'm still trying to work on but I saw a lot of the sort of senior creative directors and senior designers being so good at presentation and I was like, yeah, it doesn't matter how good you are as a designer, what matters is being able to talk about it. So this was my sort of learning at that time. The other thing I learned was it's okay to say no. I had some really cool bosses who fired clients and who said, oh no, we don't want to do this project. I had one boss who said, oh, we don't want to do cigarette related advertising and I was like, wow, that's so cool, you can say no, but they're offering so, you know, it's a huge contract but they didn't care. So I think that's something I find and I really respect that about design studios. The other thing I learned is at that time my feeling was, hey, it's really tough to work with non-designers and most of my job in design services was dealing with CEOs and engineers and marketing executives and all of this stuff. So I was like, okay, this is probably something I need to get better at. Level two is freelancing so I left design studios and I tried to do freelancing for a while. It didn't end very well so it was a bit like the Wild Wild West. Anything could happen. There was no protection from any senior creative directors. You never knew what your client was going to say at any time and I think I had this one really difficult client who kept changing requirements and it suddenly made me realize as a designer, oh, it's not just about the craft. All my bosses have continuously protected me from this, you know, harsh reality. And yeah, I found the hard way that sometimes checks bounce and then nothing can be done and you've already delivered the files. I was like, oh no, yeah. So this was an interesting learning to me and in the beginning of my career. The other thing is freelancing puts you in a weird position of working alone from home and I think personally for me, I realize this is just not fun and I'm very dependent on other people to have discussions and interesting interactions and I was like, maybe I should get back to this when I actually know what I'm doing and when I'm not just sort of struggling in the dark. So I felt at this time that I should learn more about what I was trying to do in digital in the digital world and so I took a break from design and I decided to be a researcher for some time. So this is when I, and I think during the interview they were like, oh, you don't have a psychology degree and I somehow convinced them that I could still do the job. So I joined this company where I became a researcher and it was like six month projects where you go into really small towns in India and try to understand how do they use the internet, why do they go to cyber cafes, why do women go to cyber cafes, why do men go to cyber cafes. We were trained in all of the sort of usability testing, in-depth interviews, eye tracking, all of the sort of stuff and then the end of the project was just delivering insights to the designers so I had no control over the design which was really tough but it was a huge learning experience for me. These are some photos I took in those days and we literally did a lot of real field research where each project was like six months long and very, very intense and the end of it was literally just a written document that you handed over so we did projects for people like Nokia in those days. This is of course very long ago so Nokia was real. And I usually hide this project from a lot of people but I worked on this matrimonial website and I didn't do the design for this but I did a lot of the research. I interviewed a lot of potential brides and grooms and parents in India and I think it was such a humbling experience to understand how complex it is to make a website that people are using. It's not just a website and I think it made me, this whole experience of being a researcher made me a better designer eventually. So yeah, what did I learn after this stint as a researcher? I realized UX is everything, UX is the most important thing and I became a huge advocate for UX. In those days nobody knew what UX was so you always had to sort of explain the acronym what is the full form of UX, what is it, what does it mean and it was a challenge but it was also super interesting. The other thing I learned from this experience was that research does not mean that you will succeed as a business because we had a lot of clients who spent so much money on research and they still failed and then we had a lot of clients who didn't spend that much money on research and they succeeded so I knew something, I knew that I didn't know something but it was still interesting to me that it's not only about doing your research right there's so much more to it so that was interesting to me. The other thing I started to realize at this point was that there's a huge disconnect between different people who are working on a product so there's the design team, there's a business, there's research, there's engineering nobody gets along with each other, everybody's sort of in conflict in some way and this was interesting to me because I saw this as a researcher, I saw this as a designer and I was like okay this is not really right but I went on with it and in those days what happened was the technical architecture was already built out and then you did the UX and you did as much UX as you could now of course things are much better, you know you do the UX first you decide what you want the product to be and then you build out the architecture I also started to articulate at this point that I don't care about this straight line that you go from an intern to a junior designer to a mid-level designer to a senior designer to a director, I didn't really care about it and I was just like I'm just going to keep learning whatever skills I want to learn and I was okay with it because even the researcher I took a demotion to take that job and at that point people were like oh why are you doing that but I was just like hey this is super interesting so that's why I'm doing that so yeah I think it's important to say this which is that throughout especially looking back I realized that I didn't really care about the promotions that much it was more about is this interesting is this a new skill that I'm learning and I think Kenny also mentioned that in his talk you know whenever something new came along I was like hey I really want to do this this is I think the significant part of my career which is UX consultancy or design services I worked in small companies that did it, larger companies, corporates a lot of different kinds of places this is a sustainable leather factory that I worked in so it's the design team was inside the leather factory and it was super interesting to me because I'm so like from digital and always in digital and I was scared of even working with print but this was interesting because you know we had designers actually working with the leather and the materials and I said okay maybe I should try this on the top right hand corner you can see a photo of the auntie that would make all the bags and again it was sustainable and vegetable dyes and all of that so I learned a lot about material and process during this time and what I ended up doing was helping them do the interiors of all of their stores across the country so there were hundreds of stores across the country and I would work with the craftsmen to fabricate these brass cubes and then distribute them across the stores and I even started doing ops work and actually like planning how to distribute the cubes and what happened was that the cubes were made out of sand casting and sand casting is this really ancient process of working with this material and so it would take really long to make each cube and it would take even longer to ship it to the store so it was super interesting to see how much harder is it when you're not working with digital and you have to literally like do the real thing and I started to learn more and more about collaboration while I was working with all of these designers and all of these different setups it's not just about craft I realized as a designer one of your sort of main skills is working with other people whoever they are and that's kind of crucial to becoming successful so I finally went into product kind of 100% at this point started doing a lot of iphone apps, ipad apps and this was around the time that there was this massive app boom people were just making all kinds of apps and I kind of started doing that too so this is a hospital app that I worked on I worked on various industries from medical to fintech really got into the whole sort of wireframe and visual design process worked with various clients in San Francisco, in UK and kind of all over the world these are just a few images of some of the apps that I worked on and also at this point I finally got promoted and became creative director this was to be honest very important for me because personally it's something that I had always sort of imagined in my mind when I was in design school that oh I will graduate and then eventually become a creative director but I think when this actually happened I realized oh my god this is really difficult and also I was in charge of a 25% team and I realized that I had bitten off more than I could chew and it was really really tough to handle a big team like that so it was super interesting though and I learnt a lot and as I became senior management I think my picture of the disconnect between various teams became clearer I realized it's not just about design and business it's like front end and back end and QA and business and sales and marketing and the sales guy saying something to the client and the client is just like what's going on and in all of this big picture the users the actual users who are using the thing are lost and this is the kind of problem that occurs in a lot of sort of client services industries you're providing a design service but you're very limited by the structure of the team that you're in and the way the contracts are structured so it was definitely a challenge and I learnt a lot but it was also very limiting I think as a consultant and as a UX consultant you provide a fresh perspective and that's very valuable and a lot of your clients sort of value that fresh perspective but of course it's limited and when you realize it's limited it's not necessarily a bad thing it's more like you know your limitations and now you try to help them as well as you can in that sort of limited set of things that you can do so yeah the next story I want to talk about is this project I think our team even in that consultancy we wanted to do product more and more so we started doing product accelerators we took equity from apps that you know we thought were like more interesting than the rest and then we started sort of contributing to that at another level we even sort of invested in some of them I'm not sure if this is one of those accelerators but I think this is a good example because we worked really really closely with the founders we built that prototype from scratch and then they used that prototype to get funding and this was my first sort of exposure to that whole process and I was like hey this is so interesting they are building out a prototype they are putting it in the South American market so this was for a Spanish speaking audience and we didn't know so much about it but as a consultancy we did as much as we could to understand the situation but the founders obviously were the ones who were the closest to the users and that was very interesting because we were too far away to really understand their context still I did the logo for this and it was interesting because I was finally sort of coming back full circle using all of my research and wire framing skills and all of that but also coming back and doing logo design I remember I did 25 versions of this logo and my boss at the time was like are you sure about this are you like in danger of quitting and are you really frustrated I was like no it's okay because I was actually having a lot of fun doing the logo concepts and the founders were of course very difficult to work with and every option I gave them they were like no, no, no and I think over three weeks I did 25 options it was super interesting though and eventually they were happy with this and they gave us a good review and I think this company was eventually acquired but still very interesting sort of project we also worked with this other product called Checkout which is a point of sale app and that company also got acquired and eventually became like a proper product company so it was super interesting to work with all of these various apps that were kind of breaking off and becoming full blown products and services at this time I also realized designers are really hard to work with because of course you have to continuously keep them happy as a team you have to try and understand what kind of projects do they like what kind of projects do they not like I had to deal with the senior engineers who are really unhappy with some of my designers I had to understand their complaints and I was like oh yeah my designer shouldn't have said that but then you know it was just I think what I realized at this point is just people are hard to work with it's not about whether you're a designer you're not a designer or you're an engineer it's just people and people have all of these sort of different interests and as a team lead you have to kind of support them this is also the time I think I was truly I truly became a member of the world of technology I was like oh my god I love I think this whole sort of you know this sort of vast universe that is out there of digital stuff I started trying to code at this point it didn't go very well but I was still very excited about all of the options that were out there when we were making apps it was about you know version 4 or 5 4 or 5 and every time it went to 6 and 7 our clients came back to us and wanted an update so it was very interesting for us as a design team as an engineering team every time a new version of iOS came out we were super excited it was a very exciting time to be in the industry because you know going from 5 to 6 was a huge leap now I think it feels very different when a new version of iOS comes out I don't know I was also very obsessed with the Apple HIG every time I don't know how many of you have seen the human interface guidelines every time a new version came out we would all read it we would be very excited and we would talk about it when I started working it was I think about Android 2.3 which is gingerbread but then it went from sort of gingerbread to honeycomb to ice cream sandwich and it was I think one of the most exciting times was when we sort of saw the change that came from 3.0 to 4.0 because I think Ice Cream Sandwich was a turning point for Android and it also made me start to realize oh Android that's also a product and you know they are also going through product iterations and it's very difficult for them and they are struggling and how are they struggling and how are they sort of updating it rather than just being a consumer of Android or just the consumer of iOS I started to understand what they are going through as a team and you know the early versions of Android phones had hardware buttons which were the menu buttons and that had to be internalized and I was you know really feeling bad for them that they have to do something like that and that change is so difficult so I think this was another step for me to to becoming closer to understand like how difficult it is to work in product and what are the various sort of factors involved we also started having more fun with it so Google Glass came out then and 2-3 designers from my team we came up with a you know kind of concept for Google Glass and how it can be better because you know we were not happy with it so this concept actually got featured in Wired and it was very exciting for us and we also started doing agile sprints at this time of course we thought it was agile at that time but now I know that was not agile because the client wasn't there and you know somebody from the client side would maybe be there in the daily stand up but it wasn't really a daily stand up without the product owner but we tried as much as we could we had an agile coach in our team it was a 200% company so making the company agile was super difficult we had hats and badges and the agile coach would like follow you around and I was leading like four different projects so the agile coach would like follow me from one stand up to the other and like scored me if I was like not being properly agile so it was it was quite a hard I think it was not easy for me to switch to agile and that's why I have a lot of empathy for people who resist the change because I also resisted the change so it was super interesting this is also I think one of the things that I really learned out of this whole experience is you know what motivates the team I don't know there's no answer but I realized this is really hard you know when you put an app out into the store and it doesn't get featured in the top five instead it starts getting you know one star reviews and all the engineers are depressed and you know it's really difficult to motivate a team and then the client becomes very unhappy and is telling you you know why is my app getting like one star because of some silly bug and so you have to go fix that bug and sort of keeping the team together is you know really difficult I think my other big learning was management is not management it's support you're just there as a support person to do everything that needs to be done for the team so if somebody can't do something you're there to support that and pick up that slack so that's also super interesting I think as a learning the other thing I started doing was becoming a design advocate so I started talking about my design experiences I started going to workshops I started running my own workshops and attending others this is one of the sort of fellowships that I did with the British Council and this is also the time I decided to do my post-grad and I so during my post-grad in the UK I started doing installations and that's a photo of a tiny girl who really loved my installation she was very very excited she had never seen an interactive installation before and this was more of my personal practice but also of course heavily influenced by technology and then I got an offer I got an offer from an ad agency so I was very excited this was again something that I had never done before so I had to do it it was another demotion and I think this was interesting because it just sort of clarified a lot of my thinking around how teams are structured and where where is design placed in the decision tree of your company and your team and sort of your experience as a designer and your effectiveness as a designer is completely controlled by where you are in the company structure and everywhere you go whether it's a design studio or a really corporate consultancy or a smaller consultancy or an ad agency it's slightly different designers are the same everywhere it's just you know everybody is awesome it's just that depending on where you are you're either more frustrated or less frustrated about being a designer and it also made me realize why certain companies are structured in certain ways so for example Microsoft's you know teams are sort of vertically structured because you know the design team of Xbox and the design team of you know Windows is obviously not the same team it's a different team right but in Apple it's sort of horizontally structured it's the same design team working across various products and it's not that this is wrong or right it just makes sense because in Apple you want all your products to be connected you want all of them to sort of be related to each other and that's what they're working towards and so it's the same team it's the same design team across but for Microsoft obviously the Xbox design team is going to do something completely different from the Windows design team okay so yeah I worked on this project which was sort of more workshopping with ad agencies and really sort of helping them and introducing them to Agile and this is one project that I always talk about again this is a client situation where you're providing a service to a client so you're limited so we created a prototype and gave it to them and then we did a lot of workshopping so we could sort of introduce design thinking into the team and they were really happy with the website because they made a cake out of it this is kind of like I think the most fun part of being in a consultancy but also the kind of negative in that you chase the client's happiness and it's very rewarding because clients get super happy and they make a cake like this and this cake the photo was sent to me on Instagram by the head of IT in Jordan and she was really excited we gave them the prototype but it took them one year to actually build this by the way so after it was very deserving of a cake because they deserved that cake but I think it's interesting because I still don't know how useful this website is to the users I have no visibility of that all I know is it was a success because our clients were happy and that was the sort of I think for me the internal conflict of not working in product yeah, it also made me realize advertising is a whole different animal it's this whole different industry that I really don't know anything about it was a learning experience but I think I'm still learning about it the other thing I realized is a lot of designers care about awards this was news to me I think I went through my whole career completely not knowing about this but being in an ad agency made me realize that hey, this is really important in fact getting awards actually makes clients come to you and then finally I went back to product so I started working with Postman and we first started off with this very simple looking Chrome extension which had about 30, 40,000 users and we converted it into a full-blown product you know with a web app and Mac app and a CLI we also did branding so again I used my typical style to do the logo which is very sort of geometric and simple and also we used some illustrations so you can see some of the illustrations here this is what the website looks like right now which is great I think even after I'm no longer with a team they're still continuing with the branding and this is really important so I think one of the stories that's really important about product and I think really representative of Postman was we came up with this new feature called the code generation button which the team had worked on for like four or five months but then when we release it to the product to the live to the product nobody was using it and all of the engineers were depressed because they were like what happened we did all the user feedback we did all the testing and everything and everybody wanted it and then when I looked at it it looked like it was just an icon and the icon was really abstract because coming up with an icon for a feature like code generation within API testing is very abstract so I said you know what let's just make it into a text button for now and see if it works and the next day we had hundreds of people kind of tweeting at us saying my mind is blown by this new feature it wasn't a new feature it had been there forever but they finally saw it and I think this is the most rewarding part about working in product that you can make a really small change within a day it's out in production to millions of people and they instantly feel that and tell you hey we really appreciate this it's an instant sort of feedback loop and I think that's the best part of working with product so yeah what did I learn from this I learned that shipping continuously as much as you can makes you a better designer it doesn't matter how good it looks or how happy your client is what matters is are the users happy and is your business actually doing better are people actually more engaged with what you're shipping and so the more you ship the more you learn frankly it's not how many years it's how many sprints you do as a designer going life to production that's actually going to tell you how good you are the other thing I learned is metrics are your friends I've always avoided math but I think doing a lot of product automatically makes you realize if you don't understand the numbers then you don't really know what's going on and it's been really really interesting for me this is still very new to me it's only been like two years since I started doing metrics but it's been so so interesting to see user behavior sort of represented in numbers I've always done usability testing and qualitative interviews since the beginning of my career so this has been very new the other thing I learned after working with postman was don't become the gatekeeper so this is something that can happen I think without you actually realizing it you shouldn't become the approver of all designs that are going out into the product design should be sort of intrinsic in the team everyone else should also care about design and not just the designers if only the designers care then the moment those designers are gone everything falls apart so what matters is the engineers really need to care about design the marketing team really needs to care about design and that's when you are no longer the gatekeeper and even if you go everything continues and in fact keeps getting better so I think it's of course very hard to do this but this is something that was a learning for me I also started I think getting better and better at this process and setting up this process in various companies which is iterative product design where you know user feedback and insights are the center of your sort of product design process and you're continuously building, testing iterating in a sort of circular motion keep making sort of the product better keep learning from the insights because this is not a static thing which you can just hand over the industry is continuously changing technology is continuously changing and so you have to keep trying and how can we do this best in a really small lean team where everybody is working really closely together and so now I'm working with referral candy and it's been really really great because you know we've managed to set up a really good metric system to measure all of the user behavior we have qualitative testing going on and what's interesting for me is we have just launched a new product called candy bar and we're using everything that we have learned with referral candy and all of of course all my product experience to make you know candy bar better and better it's only been a few months since we launched but we've already redesigned product like four times it's super fun for both the engineering team and the design team and I think working with both referral candy and candy bar made me realize that you know it's user centric design and user centric metrics is actually the same thing so for candy bar for example the user centric metric is just making sure that our retailers have repeat customers coming back because it's a loyalty product and for referral candy our user centric metric is the referral revenue that our service helps the retailer get and so as long as that's going up and as long as those retailers are doing well it means that our product is working so it's super interesting to sort of work towards this this is a photo of Mission Juice and Joelle who is the owner of Mission Juice and he's one of our customers at candy bar and he's in Singapore so it's super interesting we are working very closely with all of these retailers to make candy bar a better product for small and medium businesses so yeah that's about it so I covered my first commercial project what it's like for design studios freelancers, researchers design services, ad agencies and product I hope that some of this was helpful to you guys I think as a parting note I just want to say that you know explore the design world really find out what you want to do and what you like to do and avoid the echo chamber I think it's easy to just sort of keep talking to people who are exactly like you in the same industry as you really explore all of the options that you have because there are infinite options out there that's it from me thank you that's my handle and we are hiring any questions? yeah any questions? yeah any thanks for the points and questions just want to get both of your input from the industry is there a single principle when you start designing or like a design philosophy which defines your style it's like when you wake up that day it's how you feel that they can design a single principle which defines your reason well I mean from my point of view it's user centered design so that's pretty like constant as long as you build something that people like and enjoy then you're good in terms of style and your personal style it's really up to you for me I try to simplify the process it's always a challenge to make it fresh and simple it's so easy to make it very complicated than fresh it's complicated so that's always my challenge any other questions? better presentation thanks for the presentation I'd like to hear your thoughts about super apps and very very focused products for example Facebook would be an example of a super app which combines many functionalities and many products together and now that you're building two products which are quite separate it's kind of like to know your thoughts about combining products and keeping it separate yeah so Facebook is like a massive platform now and that's okay I think that's just how that's probably the plan that they had from the beginning and accidentally and I think even for Canibar eventually we will maybe combine all the products together so it's more about what is your big vision for the product what is the big sell so for example for referral candy and Canibar our big sell is we want to really help the small medium businesses companies like Starbucks don't need to help with building their own loyalty programs right it's the smaller guys who are like having trouble going into digital that need our help and so that's our big vision and if we have to make more products around that and more stuff around that that's fine so I think it's very important to have that big vision so you're not just building a product for the sake of it you have an overarching kind of goal towards it so for example Facebook may internally you know connecting people obviously it started off as a Facebook but I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg always had this big picture that he was building towards and is still building towards I noticed you mentioned there were two very different metrics for the two products that you built what was your process coming up with that and let's say how will you how will you then align her as a design wow that's a very difficult question so I think the metric for referral candy is easier to define because the product has been live for many years we have a lot of customers it's doing very well and we've grown a lot as a team to better define what is the sort of success metric for referral candy and so we can clearly say yes it's referral revenue and if a retailer is getting more and more referral revenue that means that our service is working for them candy bar is still a very new product it's a loyalty service we're still figuring it out and so right now I'll tell you that it's about loyalty and it's about getting repeat customers but in the future if we learn more about the product then we can change it so it's not like some kind of rigid thing that this is the metric that will never change we are constantly measuring lots of different stuff and we try to understand what's connected what's leading to what and should we change it so that flexibility has to be there no worries no questions right the first is regarding to the second question so how can you ensure the quality of the research in order to actually success the second question is the story you talked about our 25 clients like some of the 25 different types of local and I was wondering is there a way to maybe come up with a way to know what is your approach when it comes to really laying out the requirements or an artistic question sense for the local so there is less back and forth of the design so your first question I think it's about execution so when you say that good research doesn't necessarily lead to success I think in hindsight I would say that it's because no matter how good your research is if you don't execute quickly and on time then your research automatically becomes too old and redundant even if you do a 6 month project if the industry has changed by the end of 6 months then the value of the research is continuously reducing and as I mean in those days it may not have been that bad but now it's like really bad to spend 6 months doing research so it's not just about research I think it's because execution is important how well your execution was is important and it's not just a one time thing once you push something out you have to continuously iterate and for your other question about logos I think it really depends on the person especially with logo design it's such a personal thing you are making a logo for somebody's company which they own and which they are going to live with for the rest of their life so I think there has to be some empathy and understanding with the founder they really need to like this logo a lot because they own the company especially for small businesses I think for larger businesses it's different because there's more people involved and marketing is involved with an individual you just have to understand that person and it's more about a personal relationship I think with that particular example it did go slightly out of control and I could have managed it I could have played with it at that time so I think it depends on how do you want to manage it I think one thing that I usually used to do in those days is just present two options or maybe just present one option don't present any options that's one way but of course more risky the other thing is also to establish your expertise as a designer hey I know what I'm doing but it's of course very hard okay any other questions okay I think that's it okay thanks everyone