A globally distributed product team - a new model for design agencies?

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of digital creative agencies giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. The aim is to provide useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others who get to come talk on the show.

00:13 This is our 20th episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director at Every Interaction and joining me today I have Matthew Lenzi from Hano. Hello Matt. Hello, how's it going? Alright, how are you?

00:25 Really good. Just off the back of a long day but I'm feeling great now. Super. That sounds like a good start to 2017. Really is but a tiring one. Excellent. So why don't you kick off by just giving us a little background on what Hano do, what kind of services you supply and how you fit into the team over there.

00:48 So Hano is primarily a digital product design team. There are eight of us in the team and we help startups to grow and we help large enterprises to kind of innovate and the way that we kind of do that is by helping them make their digital products and their organizations relatable, accessible and human. So the idea is that we help them with complex ideas that they might have and find a way to translate that into a way that their users understand.

01:30 And my primary role is I'm one of the founding members of Hano and externally when I'm working on client projects I help a lot with the strategy. So I help them when it comes to understanding their purpose and how to communicate that and how that gets that becomes tangible through the product itself when that's realized and then internally I help the team with the vision and the social impact side of what we do which I'm sure we'll touch upon a little bit later.

02:02 Nice. So how did the company first form? So the company first formed when John, the original founder, the guy that said it all up, started as almost like a hobby as a side project at school just creating websites on the side and it's quite funny really because I went to school with John and I remember just watching him working away on computers thinking what's he doing like what's this all about and we kind of went on different journeys until later on when I decided to come on board. But yeah he started his own little business and found someone online that could help him who is now another full-time member of the team who was doing front-end development and they were running a business serving small to medium-sized companies just creating websites for a variety of different industries and John approached me after we kind of well we regularly meet up for drinks and catch up and he approached me saying look I would really love you to come on board because I need someone that can talk to clients and help bridge the gap between the business and the users. So I came on board and began to help them with that and eventually grew the role into this strategy role that there is now kind of mediating between the business's objectives and the user needs and helping the technical team to deal with that. And slowly and organically we just grew and we brought in another visual designer and from that initial team of four so at the time it was me a guy called Arnaz, a guy called Sergue and John we decided to become a distributed team because Arnaz was working in Norway, Sergue was working in Russia and John and I were working from London and it was around that time that we decided to go on a trip, a remote trip if you like to Valencia and I remember finally trying to convince our clients that we weren't going on holiday when we did it but it was fundamental to us to be able to meet up with Sergue and Arnaz and make sure that we were a team together. So I didn't actually mention this at the start of the show but the eight members of the team are fully distributed so one of the things that we believe in is that people should work from where they'd like to work when they like to work and as long as people communicate effectively that shouldn't be a problem. So what we kind of did is make sure to keep that kind of bond that we were meeting up often. So yeah we went to Valencia and we started working on Project Day and we became even more remote later and brought more people in and it grew to what it is today. I mean I could go into really granular details of how that journey unfolded but I don't know we'll be here all night maybe.

05:11 Yeah I mean that's what we wanted to talk about a lot today is this distributed model this distributed team that you have and how how you make that work. I think that's really unique it's something that I haven't seen any other agency do or any other agency pull off and it's got to come with its own sort of challenges I'm sure. How did the idea for having a distributed team come about in the first place what was the genesis of this idea? So when John and I were working in London together in the early days one of the things that we imagined Hanover coming is like a big office led design team where everyone's in house in London and that was kind of the vision. Standard model.

05:52 The standard model and we had you know the aspirations that young guys do of growing a business in that respect but when we did go to Valencia that first time and we took that risk of going out there and bringing the team together I have to say it just felt organic and natural but there was this kind of understanding that there was a there was a freedom that was allowing us to do better work so when I went to Valencia and I was surrounded in this completely fresh environment that wasn't London and I was constantly inspired outside of work combined with the Spanish mentality of like a good two-hour lunge and working either side of it like we just I just began to notice that my productivity was increasing I was my well-being was increasing I was doing after work talks around the subjects that I was working on and John and I both came away from that experience saying do you know what this is actually feasible with the technology we have now the fact that we've managed to keep all of our clients happy and actually we went in with the mentality of under promising to our clients and over delivering and proving to them this was a model that worked and let's just say that Valencia was the prototype for us thinking that remote could be a way a feasible way of working and from that moment we actually remember we were sitting in the park there and we said that we would commit from that point on to having two team trips a year where we would meet up and bond like that and then go our ways and be remote and carry on that way and yeah I can just I can just tell you that the the genesis of it was purely organic and all of the all of the trials and tribulations and all of the wins that have come from that were from that in the park in Spain essentially. Wow so at the beginning there two of you were in London and two in Spain? So actually Sergei was in Russia, Arnes was in Norway and Arnes has actually got a really awesome story which is on our site he wrote a blog about it at the time he was working as a janitor in IKEA. Norway? Yeah he he has a very interesting story and he was doing some some work for us just making logos and doing some visual design work and we knew him he was freelancing with us and on a whim I was like oh I just I just wonder if if I invite him to to Valencia will he come so I just sent him this email and I remember getting an email back that same day saying absolutely I'll see you there and he booked his tickets and he joined us and because he did that he took that risk and he worked with us I just remember saying to him over a coffee you should come and work with us more if you come and work with us we'll get more work I know it's going to happen and he joined us from that moment so he was in Norway doing kind of freelance also part-time as a janitor Sergei was in Russia and John and I were in London and to me we decided we'd all go to Valencia. That's amazing and so where were you working from on that first trip in internet cafes or co-working spaces how did it how do you how are you doing your day to day?

09:06 So yeah this was like at the very beginning of like the co-working scene I would say especially in Spain we found the one that was open called Work Ever. Okay. It was set up by a hyper island graduate who wanted to prove the concept in Spain and we went there and it was really really refreshing it wasn't like the wee works it wasn't like these really polished shiny incredible spaces it was really down to earth it was in like an old art gallery tables and chairs probably from a local market and everyone there was just so warm and accommodating they took us out for drinks on our first night showed us the city put them better us into events there that by the end of it I actually felt like I was part of the community and since then I go back on a yearly basis and we've actually had more interest there because it just became such a part of the experience so yeah we were just set up in the co-working space which I mean to be honest with you if we had done we also using Airbnb when Airbnb started to take off which is great so we were using Airbnb and I can imagine if we'd worked in Airbnb then you know in an apartment by ourselves for a month living and working together or in cafes I don't think that we would even have come up with this idea of having a remote model because it wouldn't have felt the same it would have been too intense living in each other's pockets or it just wouldn't have given you the same kind of feeling that there is something special about what we're doing and I think that the co-working it contributed that quite significantly actually is that a common theme now with all of your trips or or do you do the take the Airbnb and all work from the same apartment so after Valencia we did a trip to Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong and there was the four of us at still at this point so at that point we were doing more co-working spaces and we tried out a really great one in Kuala Lumpur called Nook which was fantastic and then we went to the hive in Hong Kong and both those experiences were brilliant and we were still working on client projects on our team trips at this point so we needed to be in a space with great wi-fi great facilities so the kind of team trip immediately after which was six months later was co-working and since then since the team's grown and since we don't need to specifically be working on client projects while we're having retreat we've started to just book spaces where we can all hang together rather than going co-working spaces.

11:51 I see so you treat these more as social things today than as opportunities to necessarily work all in the same place at the same time. Yes so what's interesting is like we did the Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur trip as a fort and then the team trip after that there was six of us plus we had brought along a design thinking facilitator to educate us on how the process works so we actually went to Buenos Aires with a design thinking facilitator and seven people and what we were doing is socializing and bonding as a group but through learning and through doing and through upskilling ourselves so we actually went to Buenos Aires booked out a big apartment with almost felt like a hospital in a way had like double beds and stuff and it was really nice it was just in the city and yeah we spent the week socializing but actually we were there with a purpose and I think that these team trips if anyone's ever attempted to do retreats I think it's important to embed a sense of we're here for a reason but you don't have to have the pressure of delivering to clients or dealing with those calls so on the following trips we've always had that kind of motif we're here to do something as a team name priest of business. Right and so you may set yourself a little like a hack day style environment or working on your own internal stuff rather than having client deadlines where there's a bit more pressure and probably that creates an environment where you can't enjoy the environment you're in quite so much. Yeah so like the following team trip that we did in Croatia it was in a place called Dubrovnik we were doing actually like a kind of hack week where we created two internal products in a week which is quite fun.

13:51 Oh wow. In the following team trip after Hong Kong we went in Buenos Aires and after that we were in Croatia and in both those retreats we were actually coming up with ideas for internal projects and apps that we still use today and we use those opportunities to maybe explore ways of diversifying our revenue streams so coming up with ideas that could generate money. Interesting.

14:19 So working all together when you're wanting one place be it on client projects on these early trips and these sort of hack weeks when you're all together again that all sounds you know very good and viable and great for team building but how do you make this distributed model work when you're at your day jobs and you're all spread around the globe how is it that you managed to make that work? So from an operational perspective actually working on a project it's about installing a process that emphasizes over communication. Over communication? Yeah so I mean there's certain tips and tricks that I would say like there's some certain things I would strongly recommend in a team like this for example always assuming positive intent if you don't hear back from someone and just giving them the space and the freedom but there's this kind of culture at HANA which is like over communicate if you're in any doubt that someone might misinterpret what you're saying give them a full brief write things down and actually I remember especially when we were just starting up I was writing huge briefs and lots of essay like documents for people and it made me an extremely like competent writer because I was just having to do this so it was kind of training me up in that sense but also it meant that there was less room for people to misunderstand and what I've actually noticed is in offices when you're around people you're not forced to communicate on the same level so we actually created this kind of differentiator where we were extremely good at communicating that we could use with clients so we have something called a PPP which stands for plans progress and problems and every day for the client if they're working on a different time zone to us or not we would write a document which outlines what we plan to do tomorrow full list of bullet points the progress we've made in the day and the problems we're stuck on and that would just be an embedded part of our process the same with something called CHICO which stands for check in check out and on Slack every morning and every evening you'll tell people when you're around when you're not around and it's just little things like that and I remember for a while we were also using squiggle which was a way of bringing everyone onto the screen so it's like the simultaneous video products where you can just see everyone working all the time yeah you would be able to it takes a screenshot it takes a snap of your from your camera every 10 seconds so it's not really that invasive but you can also click on a picture and you can notify someone if you want to talk to them so it was a way of bringing your office into your into your computer which was really nice so the way operation we make work is through just we've developed a process again kind of organically over time where we emphasize some communication tools that are needed to do this so now we use slack a lot which I'm sure a lot of people will be extremely familiar with now and we also whenever there's something that someone doesn't understand we jump into calls straight away we're making sure that we're running with clients stand-ups where they're involved in the process as much as we are so we'd like to tell them you're becoming part of our team but actually we say in the other way we say we're becoming part of your team and we embed everyone together in slack in daily calls with these ppp's keep everyone in the loop and we just try and emphasize to people that the best work comes from this over communication although I guess the work the term over communication is a little bit misleading because there are times where you just don't need to like give everyone an information overload so it's just being selective with what you're communicating that makes sense yeah yeah so what are what is it that you're going over in in the stand-ups on the calls every day and and how do you sync that up time zone wise I guess the client could be anywhere in the world right and your team is distributed so some of your team might be asleep while other parts of the team are giving a stand-up with the client and they're in different time zones how do you sort of coordinate all of that stuff so in terms of coordination depending on the client I can we had a few clients in San Francisco and with with the stand-ups if from being being on a London time zone and that would typically be in my evening and there are times when we're working on projects where one I mean this has happened where someone's been in Sydney while I've been in London while we're talking in San Francisco to the client but what is really really nice about that is I'll do my work in the day I'll speak to the client the client will unblock me and let me know what to do then I'll hand over to one of the teammates that's in Sydney and then their work I'll be in sleep I'll wake up the work's ready and I like to kind of call it like the time zone but that's on that you're passing on yeah so like if you can plan it correctly you're in this kind of perpetual motion where you're working around the clock even though you're not so to go back to what was the actual question like how do you coordinate it all so if there's a stand-up everyone can't be in it because some people might be sleeping or just be in a completely different zone I'm guessing you set stand-ups based around the client and to their schedule and so you pick the person closest to that time zone to be in the stand-up with them and give them the daily update but then the other team members aren't in it and so how does that sort of chain of information get passed down has that baton get uh handed from one person to the next yeah well one with the PPP so that document's getting constantly updated it's everyone's in the loop two with a sign up so it depends on the client and how familiar they are with tools some people some clients find tools really overwhelming so you keep it simple you just say slack and video calls and maybe a gdoc with clients that we have longer term partnerships with we'll get to do lists and tasks all put into into a sign up and typically they'll be we don't really believe in a hierarchical structure at Hano so there's no real managers so to speak but there are people that anchor projects that are like the client relationship with the person so that I would describe myself as an anchor typically on a project and I'll be working closely with the client and then I'll relay information to the team because what is important is that the team have a healthy life work life balance so what I'll do is occasionally just add the late call and then relay that information back via video or what I did try on one very intense project was using Hangouts on Air or Google Hangout Air it it's basically this way of recording um a Google Hangout and then it's straight onto YouTube but you can make a private video so no one can see it so I would actually just record myself in a screen share drop it onto my private YouTube channel and people will be able to just um actually get a live demo of what we need to do for the day there but I think the way that Hano kind of operates is just being very resourceful so like if we see a way of getting information across in the most effective way in the here and now then we'll do that although we do have more strict we have stricter processes for some things but when it comes to comms it's really like how can we communicate this specific thing in the best way in the best in the shortest amount of time interesting and how does your PPP in terms of a day and your stand-up relate to the client because I guess a day is relative if you're working with people around the world right so is it all just based on on their schedule and that that sort of forms your updates point yeah I guess if um it was a solar system they would be the sun and then we're the planets that go around the client and yeah definitely like we wouldn't ask a client to do anything outside of work hours and and because of the way that we operate we don't really have to set times for people to work we just say well these the hours that you're allocated to work do them when you see fit so let's say for example I've got a late night call and I'm working till like 9 p.m that means that I won't start early the next day so I'll just plan my schedule accordingly around the client and their needs but without being so flexible that it disrupts my life it's about finding compromise and a lot of the clients that we work with are just they they totally get that they're not expecting to join them on a 2 a.m call but if you can catch them at the end of your day in the beginning of their and there's like an hour overlap like I literally I've literally done that tonight then it works fine okay what if you've got you know one person working in Milan one person in Budapest one in Australia one in London all working on the same project do you ever need to be working on the same thing at the same time how do you handle the crossover periods between those time zones if you've got say two people are you know working on the same problem at the same time how how do you manage that is it again just about communicating when you know that other people are not at the same time and chipping in together and then maybe get to get to a point pausing it and when the next person wakes up they pick it up again and take it from there how does all that work again it boils down to like solid communication and people when we start a project they'll let people know their work hours upfront and people will book in pairing sessions whether that's pairing on code or pairing on visuals or even content strategy like I think some of us have even paired on writing copy before and we're able to do that because people are so upfront about their schedules that we're able to know well in advance and I think what's quite nice about the remote way of working is that you can choose when you're collaborating and when you have this kind of pure then like focus on your project so if I need to go and get things done I can easily just close down my computer I'm in a room in solitude I'll just get that done and then when I do need to pair because we're communicating in such a way where we're booking in pairing sessions on google calendar or maybe we're even just live chatting in in slack and we decide we want to have a quick conversation I'll have the ability to really focus collaboration as well okay so you do plan some of that in advance and try to try to plan especially those pairing sessions together yeah I think it's important especially it depends on the nature of the project some are quite quite flexible others are like well we have deadlines for me let's make sure that we are getting our pairing sessions in but it is kind of off the cuff it's just like how it feels on the day and you still manage to make this work because you guys you guys work pretty agile right you're doing everything in sprints yeah so you still manage to make that sprint logic work with this distributed team and everyone in in a different time zone yeah and it's mainly down to the fact that we have the these online tools that are really helping us out with that so like I don't know if it would even be possible to do this without things like asana or trello or slack or having these video calls I mean it is really dependent on their like the glue if you like that enable us to work with the sprint process but remotely and what kind of makeup of team skills and different personalities does it take a certain personality type in order to make this model work as well or do you think do you think anyone could pick this up and make it work for their business um it's a really good question and so on there's different there's lots of variants like on a client project in terms of the skills that we usually need we need to have we like having like people that are skilled in many different areas like have like a t-shaped skill set but with a kind of predominant focus on a certain area so like we'll we'll create pods that's what we've got to call them of of teams are free we call it we'll call them a pod and they'll typically be a strategist with a content focus and a narrative focus there'll be a front-end designer that's very much focused on the technical side of a project and then you'll have a visual designer that's able to bring the narrative and the content to life and they'll all work together and i find that that's a really nice blend on projects especially when we're doing we're creating marketing sites or we're doing some rapid prototyping where we're testing and building ideas with users it's quite a nice blend of of people but then in terms of personality types required to make remote work i've noticed that remote is more conducive to introverted people that like having their own space and being you know in their own world and then people like myself who i'd describe myself as leaving a little bit more extroverted it's a little bit more a little bit harder because you want to be surrounded by people you want to be talking a lot you want to be engaging with people so the thing is that remote doesn't work with just introverted people or just extroverted people it needs a nice blend you need to have a nice mix of everyone so some people are working from home and like in london your your base you're working from a co-working space yeah exactly to resolve my own challenges about wanting to be around people and i would recommend this even to introverted people because it's just quite a nice atmosphere to go to work rather than be at home but obviously people should work how where they feel happiest and most comfortable yeah so i i embedded myself in a co-working space to be part of a community and i also run a product design meet-up in london so just two ways for me to get what i need there and also a bunch of video calls and team meetings always helps i'm always pestering people online to chat to me like but it's actually really nice having introverted people and extroverted people in a team that's remote because what you'll find is remote even the playing field if you're all in a room together you'll you'll notice that introverted people or people that are shy or quiet that usually have brilliant ideas can be drowned out by people like myself that are quite vocal and like to talk a lot and when you get into a remote situation where you're writing things down a lot you've got these ppp's going on and you'll discuss something in asana threads everyone's got the time and the space to contribute equally so what it does is it completely changes the the dynamics of the team where everyone's feeling that they contribute and no one's getting drowned out and another this is a tangent but a cool knock-on effect to all of this is that you're no longer judged on how loud you are and how impressive you sound you're judged on what you contribute so a lot of other times when people think of remote especially when they bring on someone new they're always really worried about oh that person's going to slack off or they're not going to get everything and it's going to be difficult but what you find is that you'll discover very quickly if someone is capable working on the projects you're working on because they're judged not on what they say and what they're able to get away with verbally but actually by what they deliver so it's a really like interesting environment because remote workers typically tend to work a lot harder than people realize and one of the biggest things i've had to deal with in the team is actually telling them to stop working because you give people so much freedom to work at their own hours and how they want to work that they feel like that comes with a lot of responsibility so you actually get a complete reverse effect of what people assume oh people are flacking off like because they have no one's watching them but actually people feel like they said duty to work harder yeah that's interesting yeah and i can see how you can get the productivity benefits of letting people wanting to work how they want to work because you know the standard model of making everyone come to an office every day sort of forces people into a mold that they may not be comfortable in and therefore i guess you know if they're not as comfortable then i was happy they're not as productive absolutely and then the one i think core attribute to a remote worker or someone that's in a model that we are is having a level of assertiveness to them so when you're in a remote team and especially one like ours where we have no hierarchy it's about setting your own schedules setting your own tasks setting your own times like we give people complete and out to autonomy um on the provider that everyone's communicating and talking because we believe that there's great strength in that but i do i i would say that when i look for people to to work with us one of the key things i'm looking for is how proactive are they how assertive are they how much do they care about what they're doing so when someone might send in a job application for example the first thing i'll look at is not their work but whether they have a blog whether they're talking about what they're doing whether they care enough to be proactive because it's such a great sign if someone's got that entrepreneurial kind of spirit that they're like yeah i want to make this work and i do think that that's important in a remote team because you've got no one holding your hands yeah you create a community and people are supporting you but you've got no one telling you what to do on a day-to-day basis yeah well a lot of people would probably argue that that's pretty important to look for regardless of whether they're remote or not i guess because it's it's a great skill to be able to have and it generally means that that person is going to be more engaged and more interested in the things that they're doing absolutely yeah i can can disagree with you on that one cool and i think something else that i find quite unique about you guys is the way that you just document everything that you do your process is your sales tool and the way the way you do your work is becomes part of your culture and the way in which you outwardly communicate to the world you document everything through you know you blog pretty extensively about the things you do you've spent a lot of time in in writing your playbook which is really interesting putting your whole sort of corporate manual online and your philosophy how how do you think those things play into into both just selling your services and contributing to the culture that you guys are building yeah this culture of transparency and just being really radically transparent and sharing things i guess for people that haven't really experienced that before it must be like it must appear a little bit crazy like you guys are just telling people like you could literally download this manual and because and you could become a business exactly the same tomorrow if you wanted what we found from people is when we're able to share and contribute to the community and give back and actually just say this is what we're about this is how we do things it puts us in a position where we are we are saying this is the knowledge and you can have it and we are almost thought leaders in this space this is what we do and we're really comfortable in sharing that and i think when people see that comfort around the fact that we're there to share and to give back and to help people automatically assume that these people will be good to work with i think and we found that as a not that it's ever been intended as a marketing tool but we found that people will approach us and we'll talk to us based on the fact that we are radically transparent and from the playbook on like even the team now have this like this transparency that's thought all the way through so i mentioned we've created a slack bot happiness tracker for remote teams so that another tangent but you something that happens in remote is before you have a call you don't actually know how people are like emotionally like if they're happy sad or if they had a hard day or whatever so we created this happiness tracker and people get to pick an emoji out of one to five of how they're feeling that also probably sounds a little bit strange like people are being very open about actually how they're feeling on a specific day and so we created a slack bot called oscar that does this and that has come from this culture of transparency where everyone even now feels really open in sharing how they feel what they're doing what they're what they're about like it just goes into almost every element of the internal culture and then externally people are just intrigued and they want to learn more so it feels like it's just win win win i guess in a culture of oversharing or over communicating as you called it oversharing something different but uh i guess because you're not there you can't read the physical signs from everybody with every snippet of communication that you're making especially in text form that you can get from sitting next to someone permanently uh if you know if they had a bad night's sleep or they're not feeling so well you could take that into account in the over communication that you're having with them absolutely and i mean i've had it where i'm trying to deliver like some really great news about a new vision and if i if i see someone that's like not responding well to it i get confused and i'm like what what's happening but if i've seen they've checked in and they're saying actually you know what guys i was kept all up all night by a party next door and then then i see that they're tired like i can completely change the way that i deliver news or update people or if someone and this has happened before if someone's having like a crisis or they're there's something really bad going wrong i can jump in and help them and it gives people the it's so important that people tell you when these things are going on so you can support and you can help your team so fundamentally that's a core premise it's like be transparent and tell people so that they can support you it's not just so overshare or like give away too much information it's it's so as a as a unit we can come together because i think there is a kind of tie rope that you have to walk between it feeling like you're almost seven or eight different businesses or freelancers working and feeling part of a unit yeah so one of the things with with hano is like we need to have weekly team calls we need to make sure people are talking to each other and we're having these remote trips because we want people to feel like they're part of the hano culture and part of the team rather than being isolated which you have to be consciously wary of as a distributed worker yeah yeah absolutely so in a nutshell what would you say that that the benefits to clients are about this model obviously there's lots of benefits for you guys i think we've covered that pretty well but what what's what does the client get using someone like you guys who've followed this model versus the more traditional everybody sat in the same office in the same city kind of model well i think for the clients that we work with one of the things is that we're working in a way that no one else is working we function it like a startup so we are i'd say a startup we have no hierarchy we're fully distributed people can work where they want but it also goes further than that we set up a company where people get to choose their own salaries where they get to choose the amount of holiday they take we're actually completely changing the way that we believe organizations should be run and as part of that and also yet we're a social business so we redirect the profits that we make into socially motivated organizations so we're doing all of this stuff and making the business what we believe is the right way of running a business and in doing so we're attracting clients that are intrigued by that they're intrigued by a company with a purpose with a mission that treat their team as human beings so the value to to some people especially larger enterprises they're like wow these guys are on like the kind of cusp of the future of business we want to find out more so some people will work for us because of that and then from an like a kind of natural perspective i think being working the way we do creates a lot of empathy you constantly think about other people and how they're doing and how they're feeling and i think as designers we we are naturally quite empathetic and that flows into our work so when i talk to companies now what i'm telling them is that we're making we're going to help you make your products relatable accessible and human which is like my three words i say because through having this culture and this way of working i feel like we're putting humans first forget about users and numbers like if you say users automatically become numbers and these abstract things what we're saying to people is we put human beings first we're a human-centered design team and i think that that has a lot of value in the way that we make products and we create them and how they're realized and also that kind of human-centered approach both internally and externally just allows businesses to build relationships with you much easier they don't feel like hey you're a design agency that's going to take my brief disappear for three months and then show me what you've got and then take my budget like people feel a lot more at ease with the way that we work especially being so transparent as well they feel like these guys forgot this team got nothing to hide they're there for us they're part of our team so i think there's there's lots of intangible benefits there's certainly real tangible benefits like the time zone baton thing that i'll send you about and the fact that as a distributed team you're able to source the best talent regardless of location so that's an obvious real benefit so we can say we're going to source the best talent to you they don't all have to be in london we can bring together people from diverse cultures that will have a really interesting outlook on life and therefore can design in a very different way to a team of people within a certain mold so they're all in london or they're all in this place or whatever so it gives us tangible and intangible benefits if that makes sense yeah interesting so in in selling this model to a client have you ever encountered any has anybody ever had any issues with it or any fears about doing things differently this way i think that when you say that you're a remote team there is fear in certain people that just don't understand that but to be honest the priority for us when it comes to client work in general is delivering really really strong designs on time on budget and making sure that the first thing people think about when they think about our team is the work we do so if that's the first thing they think about and they see the level of our work and the quality of our work the other stuff just becomes a point of curiosity they're like so you're able to do all of this remotely how does that work i would say that the way that we sell what we do is just by being really good at what we do from a delivery perspective and then the other side of it is this whole human first that we're about doing this together with your team and this is how we're able to do that and this is the kind of reasons why so the things like the playbook and the blog and the way that we talk about so that's a really core component of that also i'd say and do you do you think that your approach and your philosophy is the main driving force behind clients finding you seeking you out and asking you to do work for them yeah i'd say so i'd say that people like and come to us more than we would necessarily approach people and one of the things that i really like personally one of the things that i really love about the hano website is the purpose page where we've clearly outlined why we exist what we why we do what we do and our values because i always think that you should just say what you're about clearly and up front and then you can filter away anyone that doesn't agree with your stance so that when people do come to you they're already primed and ready for that and i think that's another cool thing about the playbook is that people already come to you knowing what you do so that when you're in calls about working together there is already a level of understanding that's been established so if anything it's just doing it's doing the bulk of the work before you even got to that conversation with a prospective client yeah it's amazing and you make me really want to try it and uh and see if it's possible i love i love the idea of living anywhere in the world and still being able to do amazing work and have had the freedoms you talk about it it sounds like a dream come true and you know vision of the future yeah i think it's that coupled with the fact that we're we're wanting to try and do something meaningful with what we do so this idea of using design as a means to amplify and enable the good that people are already doing in the world because i think as designers we're in a position where we do amplify people's work we do get to show companies best you know we get to actually say this is what this company is all about you should buy their products or you should follow them or whatever and like being able to do that for socially motivated organizations specifically for me in environmental causes is a real like goal it's a real like i can get up and out of bed and every morning like this is what i want to do and i think that this combination of having autonomy um the ability to obviously choose your own salaries work when you when you're going to work and then this idea that you can master skills through working with hano's so you can become really great at doing fan hand or visual design or content strategy combined with this sense of purpose like hey we're here to do scalable impact that amplifies and enables good in the world is the three cornerstones of a really a really motivated team that care about what they do and i think that that's a really important facet of any organization whether it's remote or in-house yeah you're gonna have to tell me about this choosing your own salary thing another time it sounds absolutely fascinating yeah oh there's a you need to look up um teal organizations and a book called reinventing organizations by frederick la lou okay i think that's how you pronounce it it's french so la lou sounds about right i'll put it in the show notes yeah and that explains a little bit about the ways of operating without managers and hierarchy and actually going through these processes of people selecting their salaries and choosing their own holidays and choosing the even more projects we work on so we get to if there's a project that people feel strongly against they can veto a project that we work on for example there's all of these little facets that come come through or these little intricacies of how we work lovely so what does 2017 hold any new ideas or developments on the horizon and where are you guys going to head next on your uh on your next away week yeah this is all the fun stuff um okay so 2017 we are starting to deliver workshops to clients so we're coaching them helping to become more human-centered educating them about remote about ux about design thinking all the things we're quite passionate about that's interesting yeah so we're starting to do a lot more coaching and advising because it's one of our core strengths are you going to do that remotely as well or are you going to be more sort of in house with them doing that yeah so right now we offer remote workshops uh so yeah so if anyone's interested they can certainly sign up for those and we're not doing it just for like large enterprises for anyone that just wants to understand how that works so you're a disembodied head talking to up to a group of people in a room perhaps going through kind of imagine it like zord on from power rangers you know that big head in the tube well you can get those little bots now can't you that have a move around and you have your your face on an ipad on this little robot yeah walking around the room i think what we'll end up doing is a blend it's really great to be able to do remote workshops it's also really great to do them in person it just depends on on the client or the people that want to want to learn and what they want to learn um so that's one area the other area is we built a user testing tool called ping pong that is kind of using the idea that you can connect with remote testers from anywhere so you could talk to japanese 35 year old men and test your product with them so we've got this spin-off product without one of our team members has decided to go and run so he's running one of our products that we came up with in one of these retreats which is really great and so that's really exciting and then from a from our core business perspective it's about finding people clients that want to do social impact work on a large scale and helping them to we'll help we want to help them to test these ideas and then concept them and through rapid prototyping and help them to communicate the good that they're trying to do so there's there's different ways that we want to kind of to do that in 2017 right yeah and so where's your next trip uh yeah the best son and so Sri Lanka oh as a kind of a side john when we went to our hot olympa trip ended up meeting his fiance there and they're getting married in Sri Lanka wow this is a very special event it's extremely special event so we're doing a team retreat just before the wedding and then we're going to be in Sri Lanka and then we're doing we're having we're going to all be there for the wedding um the days later and it's quite a nice way to to finish this because yeah from our second team trip john actually ended up meeting person he was going to marry and he was living there now so he started a new life for himself through this whole remote world so i came back to london and was running things here while he went out and did that so it just goes to show you that you know when you go distributed or remote all of these things can happen great story amazing well i hope you guys have a good time and um yeah why don't you tell us where people can find you and more about hano yeah so if anyone's interested in my ramblings today um you can go to hano.co so h-a-n-n-o.co and from there you'll be able to access our playbook our blog you'll be able to see some of the the work that we've worked on and if you're interested in me um you can i don't even i don't really use much social media i am on twitter though at taeo lensey so a t at t-e-o ellyend today and you can tweet me i don't know when i'll look at it but i'm around good stuff well thanks for coming on that it's been great speaking yeah it's been really great i love talking about this stuff so thanks for having me on board and thanks to everyone else for listening i've been john dark at darkjaw on twitter from every interaction you can find us online at every interaction on the web and at every interact on twitter if you'd like to contact us about this episode or find any of our past episodes you can do so on our website at perspective.fm or send us an email directly to get at perspective.fm we're on the twitter as well underscore perspective FM and we're easy to find in your podcast upper choice just search for perspective FM in google music i've got podcasts overcast pocket casts whatever you like to use all the links are on our website along with the show notes from this episode and we'll see you next time thanks very much bye matt bye