Tag “teamwork”

Frisbee, bonfire and birdwatching: how we arranged a three-day studio camp in the forest for $⁠500 ★

In the middle of September we had our second studio camp. The first one took place in May, back then we kept it simple: took a walk around the old city center of Tyumen, visited the Japanese garden and had a picnic in Zatyumensky Park. This time we gathered the whole team together, rented a country house and spent three days together in the forest.

Misha, our CTO, and I are up to something

What camp is about

Camp is a corporate party but with a different spin. Instead of getting drunk and taking part in stupid contests we reinvented the way we hang out with teammates.

Camp is more like gatherings with good friends on a barbecue day when you talk about work, life, hobbies, share your favorite jokes and memes, watch movies together and play board games afterwards.

Camp is about everything that you usually don’t do with your teammates at work. Especially if you’re a fully remote or hybrid team.

When we did the first camp we weren’t sure if everything would go smoothly, so we set several rules and constraints:

  1. The camp is a project and it has to be managed like any other project.
  2. You have to prepare for the camp in advance. The bigger your team is, the earlier you should start preparing. There are only five of us, and yet we started planning our camp a month before the event.
  3. The camp lasts three days. This way you’ll avoid the feeling of tightness and get just enough time out of work with your teammates. More can be overwhelming and tiresome.
  4. The camp takes place on weekends so that everyone can make time or come from another city.
  5. Participation in the camp is not obligatory. Anyone can refuse and use this time for their own good.
  6. The camp has a schedule, but it is ultimate. You can flex it as you go like a scope on any other project.
Our team at the first Studio Camp in May. From the left to the right: Arthur and Nastya, our writers, me and Misha, our CTO.

How we came up with this camp idea

This year our studio turned six years old, and we realized that we had never come together in one place. So we decided to fix it.

We work remotely and live in different cities: Tyumen, Ufa, Saratov. All those cities are very distant from each other, so it is logistically difficult to get us together too often. It was important for us to get to know each other and take a break from work. But we wanted to spend time with ease, without a banquet and the CEO of the company making toasts.

We didn’t want to do it the way big companies do it. We wanted to do it our way.

For us, the camp is also a rare opportunity to discuss working moments and strategy in person, talk about dos and don’ts, listen to each other, share ideas, and raise important questions.

How we used Basecamp to prepare for the camp

We decided to spend the second camp outside the city. It was much harder to organize it than the first one when we simply had a picnic in the park and a short tour around the historical city center. We had a lot of things to deal with.

First, we created a new project in our Basecamp, outlined tasks and deadlines, and distributed responsibilities among the team. Everyone was in charge of something: Nastya and Misha came up with the camp schedule and a list of things to bring with us, Anna made a list of products and the camp menu, I managed the production of the studio merch, booking a house and shopping for groceries.

It took us a month to prepare for the camp. But what I like about it is that there was no rush. We kept our pace. As they say, “Slow and steady wins the race.”

The preparation began with a short pitch of mine in our Basecamp
Those are our lists of tasks: the first is for things like menu and camp schedule, and the second is for the studio merch
We designed the studio merch

For this camp we decided to make our own merch. We collected examples of hoodies we liked, and every team member came up with a phrase or a motto for embroidery.

With that, we came to Gyunel, the founder of KIKA clothes brand, and a good old client of ours. Gyunel helped us choose the fabric and design a fit of the hoodies. We agreed that it would be black hoodies of thick 100% cotton with matte threads embroidery.

We addressed our order to Gyunel a month before the camp and did the right thing: the fabric we wanted for the merch was not available at the time, so Gyunel had to order a new batch from Moscow just for us. While the fabric was on its way to Tyumen, Gyunel designed a pattern for our hoodies, and we did the prepress files for the embroidery.

In the end, we came up with a detailed doc describing all details of the fit, fabric, details and embroidery layouts. It’s a public Basecamp doc, but it’s all in Russian. You can read it using Deepl or Yandex Translate. I recommend using Yandex as it’s better designed for translating from Russian.

The merch was finished right on the eve of the camp. Perfect timing!

Four hoodies made of 100% cotton with a large embroidery cost us just about $⁠230, about $⁠56 per item.

Our hoodies right before we received them
Vasily, a tomcat of our writer Nastya, seemed to approve our merch as suitable for basking
We a rented a house in the forest

I was responsible for the search for booking a country house. We were looking for a house that fitted the following criteria:

  • With an independent heating system. September in Tyumen is usually warm, but the nights and mornings are chilly. So we rejected the idea of sleeping in a glamping house, without a heating system and a shower.
  • There is something to do. We immediately discarded daily rent houses as we would have to entertain ourselves. We wanted a place that would offer options for rest and fun.
  • There’s an equipped BBQ spot. We didn’t want to carry a bunch of utensils like a grill with us for just two days, so we were looking for a place where we would have everything we needed for a bonfire and a grill for roasting meat.

I narrowed the choice down to three options, and we discussed them asynchronously in the studio Basecamp. As a result, we chose a house named after Leo Tolstoy in Kuliga Park. The place looked great, beside there was a rope park, sports grounds, and a small restaurant so we could dine there if we were short on food.

Renting a house for two nights cost us $⁠200 which is a great price for the weekend. Just for comparison, renting a private house in the outskirts of the city would cost us twice as much, about $⁠360−400.

To make a final choice I created a separate post in the camp project, listed options there, and invited the rest of the team to comment on
We had a spacious house: two bedrooms, a sleeping place on the second level and a living room combined with a kitchen
Our house was named after Leo Tolstoy, we had his portrait at the entrance and a few books on the shelf in the living room.
We made a menu and went for groceries

Our designer Anna was responsible for the camp menu. The task was to come up with something simple that would not be time-consuming. In addition, there was no stove in the house, so we had to adjust the menu on the go.

Anna shaped out the meals and then specified what dishes and snacks we would have. Others dropped their preferences in the comments on Basecamp, and Anna gathered them all in a final Google Docs.

We made a list of groceries from the menu. On the eve of the camp I went for groceries to a huge hypermarket called Lenta, which is like Walmart in the US. It cost us $⁠100 to get enough food for four people for the whole weekend.

Here’s a final doc with the camp menu for three days
We made a schedule and a list of things to bring with us

Nastya and Misha were responsible for the camp schedule and sports equipment. They make an approximate list of to-dos with timeframes, rather in order to gather together ideas of what we could do during the day than to actually follow this plan. It helped us to be at ease and not to think what to do—we opened the list and chose the activity we felt like doing at the moment.

Take a look at our schedule:

The camp schedule was also outlined in Basecamp

A couple of days before the trip, we made a checklist of things and clothes to take with you and downloaded movies in case wi-fi would be out of order. We bothered like hell to make everyone feel at home. We thought through everything in advance, so that we could relax and not worry about things on the spot. And it was totally worth it!

Our list of things

How did it go? Awesome!

We got lucky with the weather—all three days were sunny and warm, +20−22°C.

On the first day we moved into the house, had coffee with waffle rolls with a boiled condensed milk—an immutable attribute of the camp—had a walk in the forest and played frisbee.

For dinner we had a barbecue and then watched “Treasure Island”, a legendary Soviet cartoon. Some scenes from that cartoon became viral and turned into memes, spreading way beyond the Russian speaking community.

Anna is throwing frisbee to Misha, that was fun!
We picked the right dates for the camp. Indian summer was in full swing!

We started the second day with birdwatching. We happened to see a woodpecker, a nuthatch, tits, magpies and a finch. Birds are awesome!

After lunch we played badminton, played a card game called “Strangers: Office Edition” and designed for teammates. We shared our work experience in other companies, discussed our approach to design and our focus for the next three months.

The first thing in the morning, Nastya and Anya went to look at the birds with binoculars
Me, Misha and Anna planning what to do on the second day
Nastya, Misha and Anya decided to play badminton

On the third day we returned to the city. The key goal of the day was to prepare for the launch of our new product. We gathered in our favorite coffee shop, polished some things in the backend here and there and launched our first paid service called “Okoshki”, a service for small makers who work alone and deliver services by appointment.

In Russian “okoshki” literally means windows but it’s the word people use when they have a free time slot to receive a client. A maker often says, “I have okoshko for 5 pm. Does it work for you?”

Nastya and Anya are working on Okoshki
The view on the Lovers' Bridge from the highest spot of the city

Impressions of the camp from our team

Most of all, I liked that there were many activities at the camp. It’s harder to do in the city as it’s harder to make time and it can be windy. During the camp we got lucky, the weather was perfect, and it was an ideal moment to play such games like frisbee and badminton. Well, it’s always nice to just eat in the open air.

Misha Vorobyev, CTO

We have a great team, the second camp was very cool and comfortable — even for me, as I am an introvert. Although we are all united mainly by work, we had a lot of fun at birdwatching, watching “Treasure Island”, and playing badminton.

Nastya Fyodorova, writer

The coolest thing at the camp for me is the forest and the great company of my coworkers. It was great to sit at the bonfire in the evening, take a walk in the forest in the morning, listen to the birds singing, look at them through binoculars and determine what kind of bird it is.

It was the first time I went to another city to visit my colleagues. I’m a cautious person, and for me the camp was a way out of my comfort zone. But everyone was so nice I forgot about everything.

Anna Borisova, designer

Camp is the best internal project of our studio. Managing rest and fun is the hardest thing to do and we nailed it! Time passed unnoticed, and the intensity of events was so high that I got the feeling that the camp lasted not three days, but at least a week. We will definitely do it over again, but now somewhere else!

Evgeny Lepekhin, editor

How much does it cost to organize a camp?

The first camp cost us almost nothing. The only expenses we had were the purchase of the game “Strangers” and dinner at a Mexican restaurant on the last day.

The budget of the second camp was about $⁠500, but we went a little beyond it and spent $⁠570. The camp could have been even cheaper if we didn’t make the studio merch.

Here is a list of our total expenses:

  • House rent for a weekend — $⁠200
  • Merch for the team of four — $⁠230
  • Grocery shopping — $⁠100
  • Transport — $⁠40

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this post.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask → evgeny@lepekhin.me

Our studio’s website → https://lepekhin.studio/en

If you love the story and would like to share it or mention on your blog, newsletter or social media, please do it. I’d appreciate that!

Frisbee, bonfire and birdwatching: how we arranged a three-day studio camp in the forest for $⁠500 ★
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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!

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Protect your people

Working in studios designers face three challenges:

  1. Toxic environment: time tracking, project managers constantly hanging over your shoulder, endless meetings, and other.
  2. Lack of direct communication with a client. Managers are often a hindrance, not a solution of the problems. Designers act blindly.
  3. Useless and unimportant work. People are thrown on projects and products no one cares about. That’s devastating.

If you’re a leader, a manager, or a CEO, avoid these three things in your team. Protect your people’s time, respect their focus, and feed the motivation.

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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 →

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Most meetings are pointless

Before making an appointment, I ask myself a few questions. Is it possible to do what I’m going to do without a meeting? Is it possible to solve this without another Zoom call? How else can I accomplish this task?

In half of the cases, I figure out that a meeting can be replaced with a letter, a scheduled message, a screencast, a voice message, or an old-fashioned phone call.

❌ Situations when meetings are not necessary:

  • to get an unambiguous “yes” or “no” answer
  • to update the status of ongoing tasks
  • to request information
  • to ask for or give feedback on a design layout
  • to make edits and suggestions to a draft
  • to make onboarding for a new admin panel of a website

✅ Situations when meetings are necessary:

  • to hold the initial meeting of the project
  • to present a logo, a website, or other deliverables from the contract
  • to resolve a personal conflict among parties of the project
  • to share knowledge and experience: one-on-one meetings, team training
  • to discuss issues that require a lot of clarification: briefing, cost estimate, agreement

This principle helps to understand whether a meeting is needed or not. If my email does more harm than good, a meeting will be a better option. For example, if there is increasing friction in the project, you should not dispute via email. Discuss disagreements face to face, this way it will be much easier for you to calm the interlocutor and resolve the conflict.

Though if the text allows you to solve the problem without putting the project and the relationship with a client at risk, you may cancel a meeting and find another way to get the job done. For example, it is more productive to comment on a new design layout in Figma and then hold a call on demand to discuss the feedback you gave rather than stare at the layout you’ve never seen before.

The main secret to making more time is to reduce the number of meetings. Half of the meetings people have are fucking pointless and unnecessary.

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Always be the last to speak

Good leaders are always the last to speak on a meeting. They let the other team members share ideas and feel appreciated for their opinions, and only then they make a decision.

Bad leaders never care for a another opinion. They’re too busy enjoying their power of a leadership. Team members with this type of leaders simply become indifferent to the decisions their leader makes. They end up feeling burned out and useless.

For leaders it’s important to see the whole picture, not just fragments of it. If a leader speaks first he or she doesn’t let team members have their say. Such a leader will never learn what real picture looks like!

Therefore, always be the last to speak.

No Comments 2022