Tag “async”

The benefits of being an underdog ★

Hey! We’re a design studio of five from Tyumen, Russia. It’s the first city founded in Siberia.

We were an unusual studio from the start and underdogs in the design world by any measure. Despite our small size and living 2,000 km away from Moscow we work with clients from all over the world and various time zones.

Here are five facts about us that have helped us to benefit from being an underdog:

Text-oriented. Most studios are founded by designers. They believe that glowing and bouncing animation will solve a client’s problem. It won’t. But a good and succinct, thoughtful text might. Our founder is an editor, not a designer. We spend most of our time writing. Every project starts with a longread describing what we’re going to do. That’s why our websites and interfaces are well-structured. Words are important, and we’re the most fastidious people when it comes to picking the right ones.

Local identity as a foundation. Most studios bashfully conceal the fact they’re not from the capital. Not us. We talk about it at every corner. We’re proud of being Siberians. We promote Tyumen as a great place for living and creating. We turned patterns of the Tyumen carpet into a sticker pack and designed beautiful postcards with the most beautiful sightseeings of the city. In fact, many clients choose us because we’re more real than our bigger competitors.

Remote & async. Most design studios try to get a fancy and expensive office when they start out. Not us. We started at the end of 2017 and we were remote from the first day of work. Thanks to that we had clients from Moscow, Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich, and even Toronto. We had people working on our team from Singapore, Turkey, and Hong Kong. Could that be possible if we limited our market to one city? Barely.

Without managers. Most studios have managers who loiter and disturb others by asking stupid questions like, “Is it done?” every ten minutes. We don’t do that. We write long posts and discuss things asynchronously. That compensates for our size and boosts efficiency. Thanks to that we have recently launched our first paid product within four months and only around $⁠5,000 spent. Big companies can’t even imagine this kind of budget for a product that works!

The most dependable. Most design studios spend tons of money on advertising to convince people to buy from them and assure they’re the best in business. But that’s a lie. You can’t be the best at design as design is a very subjective matter. We don’t say such a bogus. We claim the title of the most dependable design team and do everything possible to make it real. We’re never late for a meeting. We send meeting notes within an hour after a call. We finish 95% of our projects on the date we promised.

Наша команда на студийном кэмпа в мае 2023 г. Слева направо: авторы Артур и Настя, я и наш техдир Миша.

That was our story for the Underdog Challenge by 37signals. Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading!

Ten takeaways from “It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work”

The first book I read this year, and it was good. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson managed to balance the brevity and depth of their thoughts and keep their vision clear.

Instead of bringing new ideology or another corporate bullshit standard, they offer common sense as a universal tool—like a Swiss knife—to make decisions and handle chaos in any situation.

Their book is an easy-to-digest and ready-to-go manual for those who finally want to make a change at work and feel good about it rather than stressed, anxious, and humiliated.

Here are my ten takeaways from it:

  1. Bury the hustle, go with calm. Calm is meetings as a last resort. Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second.
  2. No goals. Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets.
  3. Deliver updates in six-week cycles, no sprints. Fix a deadline and budget, flex the scope.
  4. Do good work. Most of the time it’s enough to stand out.
  5. Less is more. Stop chasing many and much, choose just one target, and aim.
  6. Protect your focus. Depth, not breadth, is where mastery is often found.
  7. Productivity is a myth. Filling every moment with something to do is all it’s about these days. Dump it.
  8. No public calendars. Time is the most valuable thing we have. We don’t have the right to decide how our teammates should spend it. We may think it’s a meeting, they consider it’d better be an email.
  9. No all-nigters and 80-hours weeks. Sleep, eat, and rest enough. In the long run, work is not more important than sleep.
  10. Hire only those who fit your mindset. No rock stars and fancy titles would do if you don’t feel right about the person applying for a position.

I came to most of these ideas while running my design studio. It was good to see that an ocean away there’s a company run by similar ideas and principles.

Check out the book at 37signals' website →