&yet

We think and talk a lot about building and strengthening relationships with customers. The conversations tend to focus on first impressions, on-boarding, maintenance, and growth. It’s less common to hear about the process of ending a relationship. It can be uncomfortable to think about.

What should you do when a client or customer is ready to say goodbye? Or maybe it’s you who is ready to move on. As hard as it can be to acknowledge this interaction as another part of the relationship, what happens here is so important.

How can you make this experience of saying farewell as special and generous as you try to make all your other customer experiences?

If you haven’t heard yet, we’ve recently started publicly offering a new assessment based on feedback from our clients and readers.

As I mentioned in our newsletter on looking for that first tiny sign:

It’s funny that the service we’ve actually been selling isn’t even one we have on our website… The reason this is so funny to me is that the process of selling a new offering always seems to happen this way. We launch with something we think is going to be the right solution, but when we get to talking to folks, the needs are different and we adjust. We learn way faster than we can implement. Sometimes it takes a while for the website to catch up.

Well, our website has caught up, though we’ve already been using a new approach to help our clients get clear on objectives, key results, and priorities that I’m noticing needs to be added. (Which I wrote about in last week’s newsletter on goal-setting and stewardship. Seriously, you should probably just subscribe to our newsletter to know what’s actually going on lol.)

I was a guest speaker for a program that a friend was facilitating last week, and she asked me what motivated me to write the first version of Gather the People (what was it, 5 years ago now?). I started telling the story of getting laid off from &yet and having 60 days until the money ran out, and suddenly it hit me how surreal it is to be CEO of the company I was previously laid off from. Sure, it had occurred to me, but it hadn’t really sunk in until talking about it with someone who was looking at it from the outside.

From the inside, it makes sense. Before &yet, I was founder and CEO of a strategic web firm for over a decade. During my tenure at &yet, we’ve needed a more predictable sustainable pipeline, but it has been so hard to shift a team skilled in solving a variety of hard problems into one committed to solving a more specific one. We’ve tried a few different directions over the years, sometimes giving in to being extremely veteran generalists, other times testing the waters in a specific direction. But it felt impossible to find the one thing that was a common denominator for the whole team.

Last fall, we started doing this magical thing called “annual planning.” (I’m being intentionally facetious because we’ve historically avoided anything that faintly smells of hierarchical management, though good folks like Sally Mohr and Mark Brault have pushed for planning more intentionally in the past.)

Anyway, through that process, we were able to see just how many competing priorities we had as an organization, and that we needed to stop testing the waters and actually commit to one specific direction. We took stock of our resources, including our past wins, our strengths as a team and as individuals, the problems we cared about and were interested in solving, and most especially how we could best help our clients grow and get to where they want to go. We worked with a consultant to add some objectivity to the mix and ultimately decided to focus on building strong customer relationships through creative technology.

We’re making a change in our organization and roles that I’m really excited about.

&yet is spinning off Talky, inc. as its own company, with Talky and SimpleWebRTC as its products.

Ben Zemel will become CEO of Talky, inc. Lance Stout and Heather Young both have put considerable technical effort into building, maintaining and supporting SimpleWebRTC and they will join Ben as technical cofounders of the new company, with Lance as founding CTO. It has a been a privilege to work with all three of them as well as the many current and past contributors to getting SimpleWebRTC to this point, including Henrik Joreteg, Philip Roberts, Jon Hjelle, Amy Lynn Taylor, Diana Perkins, Lynn Fisher, Terry Carter, Elliott McNary, Luke Karrys, Dylan Staley, Jenna Tormanen, Jaime Robles, Audi Long, Kate Farrar, Nathan Fritz, Gar, Marcus Stong, NLF, Karolina Szczur, Sally Mohr, Chris Koehncke, Bear, Adam Baldwin, Jenn Turner, Isaac Lewis, Aaron McCall, Peter Saint-Andre, Xander Dumaine, and Philipp “Fippo” Hancke. It has taken a village, to put it lightly. Exceptional people, one and all.

I’m really excited for the coming year in watching the continuation of the growth that the SimpleWebRTC team and product have experienced since launching paid signups earlier this year.

I don’t think I need to convince anyone that having another person review your work is a good thing. It’s probably already built into your teams and processes. Programmers pair up and build a feature together, bouncing ideas off one another. Code reviews are required before new work can be merged into our apps. Design teams hold critiques where the work is examined and people provide feedback.

In most of these cases, the people reviewing the work are our teammates or clients. Let’s say they’re “People who get you.”

We’ve previously talked about corporate swag being broken. “Thanks for this bag of trash” is an absolutely fair response at a lot of conferences. You might be familiar with this sight: tables of tote bags filled with brochures and trinkets no one really wants.

A better option is spending a bit more for actually useful objects. The problem here though is even useful objects can create clutter. How many bottle openers, battery packs, and steel water bottles can one person really use? T-shirts can be useful, but not if they don’t fit properly and there definitely is such a thing as too many shirts.

We do understand it though. Conferences are a chance to get your company in front of people. It’s low-risk marketing, can help with brand recognition, and is a major recruiting opportunity. But dollar for dollar, how effective is it really? Do we even know? Unfortunately, swag can sometimes cause a negative effect for your product (especially if it’s just more of the same stuff along with twenty other companies’ swag).

We recently released face.camp, a Progressive Web App (PWA) that allows you to take animated gifs of your face and share them with your fave Slack channel. We’ve also open sourced the code on GitHub.

It was the first project I worked on when I (also) came back from a three-month sabbatical. I had previously burned out on coding and I found myself for the first time getting excited about having the freedom to go down rabbit holes to solve even the smallest of problems. Most of these problems weren’t even practical to solve, but I had a good time solving them.

Preact

Knowing that the site was going to be a PWA, I wanted to keep the frameworks used as small as possible and take advantage of any tooling that would allow me to do that. preact and preact-cli seemed like a perfect fit.

Hey friends with faces! We just launched a little app called Facecamp over at face.camp. With Facecamp you can share short, animated gifs of your face within your fave Slack channel.

There’s not much to it. You sign in with Slack, capture a gif of your mug, add a message, and share directly into your org’s Slack. You can share to public or private channels and direct messages (if you choose to). You can sign into multiple Slack orgs too and swap between them (I know you have a bunch you belong to).

How to be unopinionated about process, but still keep things on track.

Lately I’ve settled into a role where I act as project manager on a regular basis. This role kind of evolved organically, and I didn’t come into it with a formal project management background, but rather a design background. To me, project management just feels like another creative problem to solve.

At &yet we tend to work on projects that are outside of the box, both creatively and technically. Whether this be internal projects or consulting work, each project has different goals, unique contributors, scope, constraints - you name it. Because of this, there’s really no one-size-fits-all project management process that works for every project. I tend to reinvent the wheel (er, ‘process’) with every project. Sure, there are some basic approaches that I’ve noticed work really well, but I still see every project as an opportunity to evolve and iterate on project management as a practice.

Let’s talk about project retrospectives! Project retrospectives (sometimes called post-mortems) are pretty loosely defined as a meeting held after the completion of a project during which you discuss your achievements and what the team can do to make improvements in the future. ‘Project’ could mean a contained project that is completely wrapping up, or it could be a phase or major milestone within a larger project.

Sounds pretty great, right? BUT…Is it possible to love figuring out how to improve as an individual and team, but still not love doing retrospectives? That might be me (and maybe secretly everyone).

Though retrospectives may seem simple in concept, they can also bring with them a few challenges to navigate.

Over the past several years, static sites have had a bit of a rebirth. Heralding back to the days of FTPing plain HTML and CSS files to a webserver, static site generators like Jekyll along with static hosts like GitHub Pages and Netlify have brought the power of plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to a newer generation of web developers. One particular area that static sites have excelled at is for generating blogs, like this one! In lieu of complicated setups like WordPress that required setting up a PHP environment along with a database, static-site blogs are meant to be simple to get up and running and simple to maintain. Being a forward-thinking group of folks, &yet has used a static-site for our blog for quite a while now. However, getting it up and running wasn’t exactly as easy as the “Getting Started with Static Sites” tutorials would have lead you to believe. At one point the initial setup was so complicated, and so unreliable for our developers, that we encapsulated the entire application inside a Dockerfile to make development easier. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think a static-site generator should be so complicated as to require Docker to get up and running.

How’d you manage that?

Our previous site was built using a Python static-site generator. It was incredibly well-featured, and allowed us to do virtually everything we wanted to do. However, that power came at a cost. The code only ran on Python 2, so when macOS updated the system Python from 2 to 3, the Makefile that built the site suddenly stopped working for those working on the site (that was assuming you’d managed to properly install the dependencies the site required in the first place!). While these hurdles are easy to solve for lightly-seasoned Python developers, they were difficult roadblocks for our JavaScript-focused developers (which is the vast majority of our team). Adding Docker support was a bit of an improvement, but it was still asking a lot of our team, especially for something that was supposed to be simple and straightforward!

So how did you fix it?

You’ve made it to the final part in our lead generation self-assessment series. High five!

To recap, we’re defining lead generation as the strategic application of a deep understanding of your customer that allows you to show up in the right place, at the right time with a welcome solution to a pressing need.

Effective lead generation is a system you have control over, with outcomes that become increasingly predictable and repeatable over time.

Ready to continue assessing your lead generation? Awesome.

To recap from our first post, we’re defining lead generation as the strategic application of a deep understanding of your customer that allows you to show up in the right place, at the right time with a welcome solution to a pressing need.

Effective lead generation is a system you have control over, with outcomes that become increasingly predictable and repeatable over time.

One of the ways we use creative technology to help our clients strengthen their customer relationships is by assessing their lead generation system. Once we can see where their strengths and areas of growth are, we can apply our creativity where it will be most effective.

As useful as it is to have third-party come in and give insight on what they see (which we’re happy to do when you’re at that point), self-inquiry and reflection are also powerful.

On a personal level, knowing yourself is the first step to noticing and then changing ingrained behaviors that give you less-than-desirable results. It’s no different on an organizational level. Every day, you make choices based on a number of factors, many driven by how your organization operates by default. In order to make different choices, you need to recognize those default patterns and how they affect your results.

Helloooo! Over the past eight months or so, we’ve been doing a lot of pontificating over the meaning of life (and &yet). We now know the secrets of the universe and are ready to share them with you.

Just kidding. But we are ready to share our thoughts on an interesting problem we’ve been focused on.

“Thanks so much for this bag of trash”

We don’t always remember much from the talks we’ve attended, but this past year one of the conferences we went to taught us at least one important lesson—most swag is terrible.

Have you heard? Personal blogs are back in a big way.

The industry is seeing people and teams moving away from centralized platforms and back to publishing on personal sites and blogs. Brad Frost wrote about it, Andy Bell created personalsit.es, and Signal v Noise moved away from Medium, to name a few.

There’s been a resurgence of RSS which warms our little web hearts.

(We know a great many of you stayed with and maintained your personal blogs over the years and that warms our hearts too!)

Have you had some work done?

Hitting certain age milestones has a tendency to inspire reflection. Sometimes that includes the very literal reflection of staring deeply at our faces in a mirror, questioning: does the person staring back really show the world who we are now?

2018 marked 10 years of existence for &yet. Suddenly we found ourselves reflectively daydreaming about ways we might spruce up this older, wiser double-digit version of ourselves. Why not give our decade old logo a mini-facelift?

In the middle of 2018, I took a 3-month sabbatical from work. It was something I’d been wanting to do for over a year, while I was experiencing pretty severe burnout. I’ve previously shared a bit of what that felt like. I was able to stabilize myself for a while with significant help from my personal and professional support system. But extended leave was still calling me.

There were logistical decisions to be made and questions to answer. How long would I need? What kind of financial place would I need to be in? Would &yet hold my job for me? That all felt easy compared to the more nebulous and philosophical questions on my mind. In hindsight, three months isn’t that long, but our country’s culture has a way of punishing those who step away from work. And it encourages us to punish ourselves.

I had a lot of thoughts. What if taking time off doesn’t help? What if this time away damages my career in some way? What if I forget things, fall behind?

What if I lose a part of myself?

&yet has been remote-friendly for a long time, but right now we’re the most remote we’ve ever been. We have team members in Seattle, Portland, Folsom, Phoenix, Pennsylvania, and Germany. The folks in Tri-Cities, Washington (a sort of “HQ”) work remotely too from co-working spaces, coffee shops, and home offices.

We love gathering together, but sometimes it’s just not an option. So this past December we decided to try an all-remote holiday party. Some activities worked really well and others not as much. Here’s a rundown of what we did!

👍 Recommendations

In December the &yet team had an all-day, all-remote holiday party. One of our activities was live-collaborating on a Recommendations doc for all the things we enjoyed throughout 2018 (and earlier years too). There’s some good stuff in here so we figured we’d share it with you!

(Things are organized in the order they were added and include some comments that were left in the document, too.)

Books (nonfiction)

• One From Many by Dee Hock
• Principles by Ray Dalio
• Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer
• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
• Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Dr. Hannah Fry
• The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael Singer
• The Art of Gathering: How we meet and why it matters by Priya Parker
• The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavitz
• Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles by Taisa Kitaiskaia
• A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life by Parker Palmer
• The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Lerner
• A Soprano on Her Head by Eloise Ristad
• The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City by Misha Glouberman
• Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
• The Courage to be Diskliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
• Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine
  📝 +1
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
• The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler
• How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah