What Shipped: Issue 12, 2021

Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future worth retiring into. We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in the past few weeks:

1. Building a brand backlog together
   Serving up our brand guidelines and tools like a SAAS. We’re the service; the rest of the biz are the users. How can roll the tools out that the business actually wants and uses?
2. When you are raised in a PR agency environment, you’re not trained to sit with ideas. Moving from agency to in-house has been one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences I’ve encountered in my career, especially when it comes to ideating and sitting with ideas that are half-baked.
3. Time to (briefly) celebrate. With guidelines in the wild it’s time to crack on.
4. Working on remote work. Grace and Amanda take to the airwaves of Soundcloud to talk about what they’re learning about remote work, with a focus on asynchronous work vs synchronous work.

Building a brand backlog together

We’re coming to the end of our brand identity refresh. Yay! Next up: put it in people’s hands. I wanted to find a way to help people not just see our new brand but actually tell us what tools and templates they wanted from us, and to help us prioritise what was most important.

Questions I wanted answers to before we started our rollout:

• What tools, feedback loops and ideas does the rest of the business actually want?
• How can we prioritise the tools, templates or trainings that will make their lives easier?
• How can we involve the rest of the business in an asynchronous way?
• How can we make this more fun than me hounding folks to tell us what brand assets they want?

My approach (thanks to some help designing the input process — shoutout to Grace Palos for co-designing)

1. Run a workshop with a rep from every team. We did this in Miro. The nice thing about this is that you’ve got a record of people’s input to refer back to. I used this to build a list of tasks we needed to complete to fully roll out the brand across the business.
2. Theme the list. Build it into Asana.
3. Get the people doing the work to estimation effort required to complete the tasks.
4. Record a Loom video (my new favourite tool) to show rest of biz how to prioritise the pieces of work they were most excited about. Getting them to do this asynchronously allowed the rest of the business to participate, which was invaluable for getting a read on what people actually wanted from our team.

What I learned:

• The old habit of ‘holding a meeting’ to gather ideas dies hard. The first meeting I held with reps from every team probably could have been asynchronous. If I were to do it over, I might have adjusted this meeting to be either 1) shorter or 2) completely asynchronous to better respect people’s time.
• Participation from the wider biz > thinking you can craft the perfect list. Creating a way for people to write briefs directly to us is a GREAT way to give agency to the rest of the business for telling us what they need from us.
• Follow up > one and done ask for input. People get busy. If you want input, shout out for more input and find different formats to ask for input.
• Have a little fun with it > making it a Big Important Task. For me, fun looked like referencing Bernie Sanders and the Bachelor in my requests for input from the team. Why not? You’ll up your chances of participation from other folks and at the very least, you get to have fun in your day, right?

The meme that keeps on giving.

— Amanda

When you are raised in a PR agency environment, you’re not trained to sit with ideas.

What I learnt in the last month when it comes to ideating in-house.

Agency

“Let’s come up with a campaign for a client and present it in the X hours you have allocated”

In-house

“Here’s a proposal, insert team clarifying questions and reactions, insert me rebuilding the concept, insert Amanda and I stretching the idea to a point where we feel like we are in quicksand, insert the moment where we feel we are released from the quicksand with an idea that is moving, insert presenting it back to the team for clarifying questions and reactions”

In the agency world you look after eight or so clients, you spend time ideating on new press angles, ideas for new business pitches, ideas to keep your team motivated and the occasional client idea that will get cut through in your allocated hours and move on with your life. No offence to anyone that is from a PR agency reading this, this is just my hot take on my experience.

Fast forward to my in-house life when you have an idea that needs a lot of building, stress testing and taking into account the team’s reactions and builds. It’s a lot when you come from a world where you are conditioned to share the idea, build it out, if the client likes it — go for it, if they don’t move on to the next.

The last four weeks Amanda and I have been sitting and stretching a half-baked idea where the goal is to get people to take climate action around a climate and media moment, and we experienced a range of emotions of:

• Is this right?
• Why are we doing this?
• Why are we adding to the noise around X?
• What’s our role?
• Why would people care?
• What’s the takeaway — how can people share?

And more feels…

And then last week Amanda had a lightbulb moment — let’s unpack the tension point, this is where we both felt a big release, that we were on to something that ignited a sense of hope, and action vs creating more noise around a cluttered topic.

So here’s what I learnt:

Time is your friend — in my agency life we would make money with time, that’s different now. Sitting with ideas and stretching your thinking is a rewarding experience despite the feeling of being stuck.

Taking into account your team’s reactions is crucial — then working to an end just to get a piece of work out the door. Your teams clarifying questions and reactions mean everything, if they don’t buy it, then why would your target audience.

Find your Amanda Gordon- find that person who is going to ride and die with you on evolving an idea and get it into a place where you both feel energised.

— Alana

Time to (briefly) celebrate

I’ll keep this pretty short, but thought it was worth popping the cork on an imaginary champagne bottle and performing a virtual fist pump as we’ve launched the first version of our brand guidelines. And also huge props to Universal Favourite, who we partnered with on this update of our visual identity.

This is usually the mic drop moment for a lot of branding projects. With guidelines delivered it’s time to sit back and chill. But being in-house, it’s entirely different (in a good way). We’ve created a really awesome body of work to build on, but honestly this is where a bulk of the work begins. Don’t get me wrong, having guidelines we can share and be proud of is a huge moment, but now we need to make them real. So often after handover you watch and wait, to see how much the client butchers the work you’ve been so invested in. Sitting on the other side I’m here to make sure that doesn’t happen. So cheers to guidelines (version 1 anyway) and bottoms up for the rollout.

If you’re keen you can take a peek at our guidelines here.

— Nick

Working on remote work

Grace and I have been talking about working fully remote, synchronous work vs. asynchronous work, and what we’re learning. Listen on Soundcloud.

Hot takes 🔥

• “A lot of us find synchronous work easy because we talk without really taking the time to process in the same way that we do when we write things down.”
• “Soft power reigns when synchronous work is the default.”
• “Synchronous work is exclusive to a specific kind of work, not to the quality of work.”
• “Anything that’s not written down is tyranny.”

Some questions we riffed on:

Q. Do you have to be in the same room to be creative together?

Amanda: I really don’t think you have to be in the same room, I actually think space is really good for the process, but you do have to have an intimate knowledge of your own process and the creative process. And you have to be ok with a remote level of connecting with your creative peers, not doing it over a beer at a pub.

Q: Do you think there are industries or types of work that are more suited to async or sync work?

Grace: Half of me thinks we’re still figuring this out. A lot of people say ‘this kind of work isn’t working’ but a lot of this is just — we’ve never tried it. By putting an idea down on paper and proposing it. I draw the line at socialising and relationship building — you can’t build a relationship — though many of us has tried — through texting. I’m really interested in putting my time into social things, relationship building, and putting my asynchronous time into work output.

I’ve also been thinking about the role of leaders to docuemnt decisiosn. There’s none of this power hierarchy by who has conversations with me the most, I’m making that equal and transparent by documenting. And I mean just a few sentences — I don’t want to turn this into business cases, we’re talking handbook style.

Q. What would you say to someone who wants to start working asynchronously?

Grace: The first thing I’d ask is: does this need a meeting? And why? The first thing we did was p the threshold for a meeting. They have to have: a purpose, an outcome, and an agenda. Even by adding those three or four things — suddenly a lot of meetings dropped off. Because you can send a Slack message or write a document. So once you add some thresholds to the meetings you’re having, time boxing them — not letting them go over, defaulting to half an hour meetings, and letting people be optional in the meetings.

— Grace & Amanda