If you've been around here for a while, you may have noticed that dwyl does many things: we build open source Apps, websites and modules. We build for ourselves and for many clients. We write tutorials, promote open source, provide technology training, and get involved in accessibility & women in tech initiatives.
It didn't start out like this.
We began with a product MVP, then in order to support Founders & Coders and ensure the lights could be kept on at this organization that dwyl's co-founders were heavily involved in building, we started to take on client projects (again) whilst building our learning community by sharing the knowledge as we went.
2017 is the year of formalising the various types of work we do into their own, neat groupings of activities, the various branches of dwyl.
Each branch will have it's own mission, detailed goals and timelines, feeding directly into dwyl's overall goal.
dwylers will work within one area
for at least 50% of their time,
but will contribute to more than one
depending on personal preferences
and dwyl's priorities.
For example, an engineer working mostly on product
could spend some time doing QA
on a services project
and also produce an introductory video tutorial
for a new technology they've learned.
All branches must contribute to our fixed overheads and/or contribute to our credibility as experts in a given field.
Each branch will have its own set of goals, derived from dwyl's guiding principles which will be refined over time to serve as it's decision making framework.
Building products is how we serve the most people.
Our intention has always been to be a 'products company'.
Building tools that make our lives easier and more effective as an
organisation means that we will be start by solving a problem we not only already
intimately familiar with, but are passionate about solving.
Market research will be carried out and a business case will be put together for the creation of each of our products.
- Do we use/reach for the product every day?
- Further goals to be set:
- Date for MVP
- Number of active people by the end of the calendar year (based on repeated interaction with the app, not time spent on it)
Our first product will be time
To support this and help our people know what to prioritise we are building tudo and CRM.
Built with a modular architecture, this application will be a cross between a to-do list and a time tracking application.
Time will benefit from a positive network effect where increased usage of the product leads to it being a more valuable product for everyone (plays into open source).
- Effortlessness (e.g. one-click timer start)
- Minimum friction (e.g. If a GitHub URL is added as a task, all of the data is pulled from GitHub and filled in automatically)
- Improved focussed time
- Effective time management (understand where your time is going & how to improve)
- Improved team communication
- Focus on the individual's potential/productivity first
- Ability to share with the team built in from the beginning so people know when they would be interrupting ("I'm on fire" one-click warning to others :wink:) - key is to do a lot of research around what people want to share and what they want to be shared with them
We have outgrown our 'spreadsheet' customer relationship management (CRM) system and need a place where we can securely and accessibly store all our client communications so that the whole team can see and contribute to these.
Our CRM code will be fully open source, following our guiding principles and removing as many barriers to entry/use as possible for small businesses with a social impact. The data however, will not be accessible to anyone outside of the organisation or sold to 3rd parties (a la LinkedIn).
Value lies in:
- Linking all of the branches of our business together
- Excellent low risk learning project for learning our new stack
- Modular architecture which is easy to extend without becoming super patchy
- Modules re-used across multiple products and services projects
- Transparency on business development for all of our team
- Central location where data can easily be entered as our business development efforts expand with Services and Training offerings
- 50% of all charitable organisations we have spoken to have told us that their current CRM is not fit for purpose, we could easily begin to provide a solution to this problem if we desired
There are many 'small' enhancements we will be making to increase the effectiveness of our own workflow. Each should be evaluated as a potential product.
Our Services arm is how we help other organisations serve their communities and achieve their social goals.
We already do far more than just 'web development' for our services clients and this should be formalised into our offering.
Deeply understanding the problem and helping organisations to arrive at a solution with actionable metrics is where dwyl adds the most value.
Our 1 to 5 day workshops will be the cornerstone of the Services offering, providing clients with:
- Understanding the "success drivers" i.e. "ATMs"
- Proposed technical path forward - what technology can the client use to be more effective at reaching their organisational goals
- Simple prototype
- Effective agile collaboration and user testing training
These workshops will be our largest 'per man hour' contributor to fixed overheads from our Services branch by the end of 2017.
Everything we build must have a social impact or reusable open source components.
Our processes for the delivery of product development and working with services clients are already highly developed. These will remain in flux and be [continuously improved]((https://github.com/dwyl/dwylbot) as we build our own products.
- Delighting our existing customers
- Writing out the structure for our ATM workshops
- Building sales through delivering great work and sharing "success stories" (case studies)
- Creating a simple way for people to share our services
- Did we get a good case study quote from the client/project?
- Quantitative feedback from clients (particularly if they would work with us again)
- Sources of new leads (using Google Analytics and conversations, recording
this in our CRM)
- Number of new leads from recommendations of existing clients
- Effectiveness of and time spent on individual marketing channels (particularly social media)
- Cost of new client acquisition
- Net promoter score (NPS)
Training is how we share our knowledge with individuals and organisations in our team and community, building them up.
Internally, we want to ensure dwylers continue to learn and grow; facilitating that process by fostering the sharing of knowledge is essential to us as an organisation and the learning culture we want to encourage.
Externally, we have identified a clear need for user-centric technical training both based on requests from our immediately local community (particularly in the social good sector) and the engagement with our existing online tutorials and as evidenced by the number of training platforms and companies appearing weekly.
We will use our own products across all of our training, demonstrating that we have successfully implemented what we are teaching consistently.
As we do now, we will continue to evaluate each part our product and services cycle as a potential candidate for a learning resource and workshop.
Workshops will be run internally in QuietSpace to share our knowledge with our team and with QuietSpace members as well as for our services clients.
They will be captured on video and edited so they can be shared with our remote community.
Current workshop topics:
- HTML/CSS for designers
- User testing
- New stack
- Automated testing
- Pragmatic Agile development
Each workshop will have a defined structure and proposed audience.
Initial incarnations of the 'HTML/CSS for designers', 'Pragmatic Agile Development' and 'Automated Testing' workshops have already been held and will be reviewed and iterated on.
Whilst text-based tutorials have been our current way of disseminating knowledge, these are not great for visual learners and limit our audience to people who are comfortable using and navigating GitHub, which a lot of beginners are not.
Expanding into video content will allow us to:
- Establish a new channel of learning for our community (especially for visual learners)
- Uphold our values of creating a learning community
- Enhance our credibility as subject experts
- Create in-bound links to our other content, products and services, in turn improving their SEO and exposure
The first step is to create a five minute introductory video to each of our learn tutorials so that we can determine what people are interested in learning more of and define which subjects to invest our time in developing content for.
- Number of hours spent creating content
- Number of click-throughs to other dwyl content
- Number of click-throughs to dwyl websites
Running our own co-working space is how we create the best working environment for our London-based team members and for London-based organisations looking for a productive and creative workspace.
Currently, this is set up and known as QuietSpace.
Having influence over the decision making in the place where we work means that we can feel like it embodies our values, we can dictate the conditions in which we want to work and we have a space which we can adapt to our goals and objectives.
- Set our own rules to ensure a productive but fun workspace, mixing focussed time with camaraderie
- Surround ourselves with a community of like-minded people, not limited to our own team's views and skillset
- Prototype our remote-first mindset by creating a space that is perfect for digital nomads (which we can learn from to help others unlock their potential in Phase Two)
- Freedom to transform our office to fit any one of our endeavours, particularly running workshops, filming training videos and improving the wellbeing of our team
- Having a space which we can provide to social impact organisations in need of a place to hold events
- Take the unnecessary financial burden off Founders & Coders' hands (prototype of our remote-first working culture, offering a space).
More to come, but these are the most immediate!