Finance

• Intro
  • Implemented new token system with first run in the budget meeting at end of September.
• Goals
  • Keep Deep Work in a position of financial strength.
  • Organise and make Deep Work efficient.
• Tenets
  • Current finance system is complex and having issues, moving to software soon rather than implementing something new.
• Current state
  • Small issues need to be monitored and fixed.
  • See lesson learnt for other points:
• Lesson Learnt
  • Missed items from budget meeting: tokens and praise. → Improved process and meeting notes for next time.
  • New token system needs work to make sure representatives move tokens in a timely manner for distribution. → Made part of budget meeting
• Strategy
  • See above after →
  • Charlie in Finance Director role for monthly tasks, Andrej representative to monitor in relation to overall org health and strategy.

Operations

• Intro
  • We will start the decentralization of strategic representative roles to those who are interested in owning the studio.
• Goals
  • Decentralise proactively.
• Tenets
  • Representative roles are like “small CEO” roles and require paying very close attention because the organization depends on it.
• Current state
  • Representative roles are now only held by Andrej, who is onboarding everyone who is interested specifically into these roles. Here is the documentation for the roles and you can apply to the role in Deep Skills.
  • People are contributing more and ideas are being shared interpersonally. Do we need a central place to keep track of them? Blockscience has a separate internal research department. Let us know in the #discussion channel.
• Lessons learned
  • We have many motivated people who are in a motivated position to fill the different representative roles, they just need a bit more experience in different areas.
• Strategy
  • Mentor them as much as possible into the representative roles and progressively decentralise.

Design Consultancy

• Intro
  • New offerings, progressive decentralisation of the department.
• Goals
  • Strengthen Deep Work’s value proposition.
  • Solidify the department and make it more autonomous.
• Tenets
  • The main value of the consultancy lies in giving teams and founders design advice, regardless of who they end up working with. Based in prospects’ comments, it clearly distinguishes our work and personality from other agencies who are trying to sell their service.
  • This also means that taking the calls requires significant experience in Product Design, Facilitation and User Research.
  • The team working on consultancy consists of Creative Directors from the Design department. We should see the Consultancy as part of the Design department, to avoid confusion with Deep Skills and the DAO consultancy. A potential solution would be renaming it to “Design Studio Consultancy”.
• Current state
  • Grid documents to calculate and customize project rates are now updated and tested.
  • We have a small team working on outreach. They are gathering potential clients with design needs and sending them cold emails to recommend signing up to a consultancy call or explore our case studies. Follow the process in the #outreach channel.
  • We also now have a new copywriter who will participate in the next branding project.
• Lessons learned
  • Clients often request frontend development. We have multiple designers who are very familiar with Webflow, which is a low-cost option. Denis, who is an engineer for Deep Skills is happy to scope out custom development work, which is more suitable for more complex projects.
  • The outreach team sent messages to potential clients with a tone of voice that does not represent Deep Work. Do we need a guide that summarises the tone-of-voice Deep Work uses in outward-facing messaging (example)?