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Diesdas Wiki How we think + roll

This is the place where we collect all things Diesdas; our company culture and philosophy, guides for new employees, and any interesting bits and pieces about the team and the company.

We decided to publish this handbook to give everyone a look behind the curtain, so you can see how we roll as an organisation. We hope that you find this useful.

How we work

Agile Mindset

On most bigger projects, we follow Agile methods such as Scrum or KanBan. However, we don’t religiously implement all of their rituals. When we say that we work Agile, what we mean is a general mindset rather than a specific process. For us, this can look like the following:

  • Keep an open mind and be able to change course
  • Work in close collaboration with the client, users and stakeholders
  • Start small, reduce complexity, radically simplify
  • Have a multidisciplinary team on every project so people can learn from each other
  • Assign a diverse team to tackle challenges from different perspectives
  • Stay quick and nimble, questioning your hypotheses, instead of sticking to a preconceived plan
  • Value feedback, no matter where it comes from
  • Work with real users/customers to validate assumptions
  • Launch early, inspect and adapt and create positive feedback loops
  • Empower employees to work in a self-organised way
  • Take time for reflection and iterate on the process itself
  • Give credit where credit is due

That being said, let’s be (brutally) honest. Not every project is perfectly suited for Agile methods and this has two important reasons:

  1. Scoped budget: Most of the time an agency (any agency, really) has to work with some kind of budget constraints. While we all would like to spend as much time as possible on research, strategy and perfect user flows, we have to prioritise and see every discipline in the context of the overall project budget. That means, even if we like to follow agile rituals we have to live with the fact that we work within a defined budget.
  2. Multiple stakeholders: Agile methods work best when there’s one dedicated product owner on the client side with authority to re-prioritise and re-shape project requirements. The bigger the project, the more unknowns emerge, making iteration a necessity. We stress this in initial project discussions because openness to change is crucial to project success. When multiple stakeholders use planning time to debate features rather than make decisions, it wastes both budget and time.

Interdisciplinary Approach

The best solutions come from close collaboration of people of diverse backgrounds and disciplines. We are designers, strategists, project managers and developers with different nationalities, education and interests. We happily share our perspectives and experiences and love learning from each other. In our biweekly Show & Tell we share about the projects we’ve been working on, and from time to time someone talks about their personal endeavours.

People sitting around a table with post-its in a workshop setting

Remote & Flexible Working

We know that you don’t have to work in an office to be the best you. We trust our team to decide for themselves when or where they are the most productive and that they know how to set their own schedule in the best way. To accommodate for this style of work, we’ve laid down some guiding principles:

  • All our processes and rituals should be accessible for remote people with less-than-ideal internet connections
  • Choose tools that are collaborative, sharable and real-time
  • Accommodate for mixed meetings by adjusting technical setup like microphones, screens etc.

That being said, we strongly believe that true personal connection can only happen through facing one another, spending time together even if it’s just sitting in the same room. Hence we advocate for spending time in the office at least once or twice a week and we give you good reason for doing so. We opted for weekly team lunches. To stay flexy you can join a monthly Yoga session in the office and we plan on hosting meetups again very soon.