Delightful Reveal #6

To the customer that said “Thank you for caring and making it good”, you’re welcome!

What we did:

• Held a management summit.

  • Discussing team expectations so that we can grow our skill sets and clarity on what we all do everyday.
  • Booked tickets/airfare out to Madison for our March meeting.

• That travel logistics platform we’re building.

  • Prepared basic marketing personas based on user research to date, and met with the client’s CMO and brainstormed brand naming and archetype ideas.
  • Completed three user research sessions. Prepared a findings report and wrote acceptance criteria for those designs that tested well.
  • Welcomed a new, collaborating product manager to our retrospective!
  • Restructured the data model for proposals by injecting a new expenses layer and dramatically simplified calculations.

• Caught up with friendlies:

  • Cory Foy, Cornet Design
  • Jon Kinney, Headway
  • CJ Kihlbom, Teamtailor
  • Brooke Saucier, Knektar
  • Gustin Prudner, Equifax
• Talked through name options with Suzan Bond for a new product effort.
• Published How I Use Emacs to Manage a Project by Chris.
• Created an importer that will allow application users to bulk upload Customers, Service Locations, and Contacts. 
• Flagged in a set of users to experience the new API we’ve been building over the past year.
• Developing user customization on template, snippets and overall brand identity. 

What we’re reading:

• NYTLetter.com
• Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (StoryGraph)
• Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mel Hudson (Goodreads) [Sentient octopodes!]
• Ways of Being by James Bridle (NYTimes book review)
• We Are Not ‘System Designers’ (and Other Random Thoughts On the Scales of Design) by Corneliux (UXPlanet) 
• The Evolution of Auth0’s (Ops-first) Research Practice by Brad Orego (Medium)
• The maze is in the mouse. What ails Google. And how it can turn… by Praveen Seshadri (Medium)
• On Fear by Anne Gibson (The Interconnected)
• “Are We Really Engineers?” by Hillel Wayne (Hillel Wayne)

What we’re listening to:

• Bullseye interview with Mike Mills about C’mon C’mon (NPR), which is a really really excellent film

• Golden girls…?

  • Golden Girls- Thank You For Being A Friend (Gospel Remix) (YouTube) 
  • The Golden Girls Theme - Single (Apple Music) 

• Podcasts

  • Will Ozempic Solve Obesity In America? A Debate (Apple Podcast)
  • Your Undivided Attention - Synthetic Humanity: AI & What’s at Stake (Apple Podcast)
  • For Flux Sake - a pottery chemistry nerd podcast (Brickyard Network)

• Tunes

  • Imperial March (Apple Music)
  • Robyn - Dancing On My Own (Official Video) (YouTube)
  • “Yards / Gardens” by Kate Bollinger (YouTube)
  • ‘New’ National Single (Spotify)

  • Titus Andromedon Stars In Cats The Musical

    Netflix Is A Joke (YouTube)

What we’re interested in:

• Googling “Darth Vader butterflies”
• Code for America Summit
• Nerve glides Instagram, YouTube 
• Trigger Poiqnt Therapy
• Mud
• Jazz Cups
• Andrea Gibson, specifically this small poem on breaking the mold and self love
• Sandwich boyfriends

What we’re struggling with:

• Lunch as an everyday activity
• Having eaten bad hummus
• A cold sore
• Adjusting to forearm crutches
• Adding new bullet points in shared docs
• Deciding on new glasses
• Waking up in the middle of the night with mystery ralphing and unsettled tummy feelings
• Thinking of a good brewery name
• My boyfriend isn’t a sandwich
• Are boyfriend sandwiches hotdogs?
• Clipboard laundering

What we’re buying:

• Aged White Tea
• Gel Wrist and Thumb Brace 
• More router bits: keyhole, t-slot
• Cookie dough
• Our final king cakes of the season :( 
• Theracane

What we’re celebrating:

• “This is so cool, this is SO cool, this is gonna be game changer for us”
• “Thank you for caring and making it good”
• Gluing beans and sewing sequins to things, getting ready for Deep Gras and seeing all my friends out celebrating in the streets
• SmartCrutches
• Jazz Cups and the idea that maybe the same design could appear on crutches
• My dog’s after bath zoomies
• “Her boyfriend is a sandwich”

If you’re looking for a team to help you discover the right thing to build and help you build it, get in touch.