Contemporary communication tools, one-off projects, non-coercive marketing

After a brief period where Draft had three open slots for consulting work, we now have two. Throw your info over here if you’d like to begin a conversation, or get started today with a roadmap.

Our repositioning, of course, is continuing apace. We seek to structurally ruggedize the business against what we view as an ongoing state of global crisis. More specifically, direct-to-consumer ecommerce has always had significant issues, which we’ve outlined in multiple threads. These issues are exposed by collapse.

Towards that end, we are acutely aware of our ability to generate outsize economic value, especially in solving expensive problems for larger ($10M+ ARR) software & ecommerce businesses. After all, the larger the business, the greater the value. Others are aware of this, too. Draft hasn’t been open to the possibility of custom work in almost a decade. We are now.

As a result, if you’re interested in pursuing one-off projects that are focused on customer retention, education, and increased lifetime value, hit reply to this email and get in touch. We don’t bite.

This week, for paid members

• Our fortnightly teardown is for contemporary carry brand Carl Friedrik.
• Our design of the week covers a very interesting design detail in buy boxes. Want to know more? Join us and find out!

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

Links & analysis

• Essential: how to market to people without coercing them. Treat others well, full stop.
• In graduate school, I majored in human-computer interaction, or HCI for short, which is effectively the discipline of understanding how we interact with technology. Think interaction design & cognitive science in a blender. I ran classical eye-tracking studies and ran usability tests. Then, the practice of “product design” came about as a way of wresting political control from those who did the necessary work of understanding customer needs. Now the pendulum has come full circle: apparently product designers can learn a lot from HCI.
• Annual reports are starting to come out. Here’s one on the state of the web. Here’s another on carry trends. If you find any good ones, hit reply and let me know.

This month’s free lesson: What are the benefits of modern project management tools for remote work?

Prior to the Bad Times®, for a certain strain of company it would always be a little weird that we worked remote. Everybody else would be in an office, we’d be on your computer, and we’d tell you what to do.

Then the Bad Times® hit and all of a sudden, we were on the same level as everyone else, one Zoom window in a Brady Brunch grid of them. One of the weird bits of solace of the past two years was the sense that yes, internet can be made from anywhere, and no, it wasn’t the end of the world. It is still not the end of the world, and it won’t be the end of the world, despite what others may think.

Still, some people who were once local are still local, and so there’s a sense that bodies must be in the room. Fine. I don’t care where your body is, only that the organization is able to communicate well.

And so, we believe in a few things around here:

• No matter what your return-to-office policy is, your organization’s DNA lives on the internet. Period. Non-negotiable. The instant one person works remotely, or the instant you work with any remote contractor, your business needs to create sources of knowledge that live on the internet, project management structures that exist on the internet, and ways of meeting that are on the internet. The notion of a human in an office, on Zoom check-in calls, is and will remain very real. Plus, it’s not like people are using filing cabinets, white boards, post-it walls, and printing everything in 2022.
• Businesses live & die on their ability to communicate. Where is the official source of truth? How are decisions made & delegated? How do people remember what to do, and when & how to do it? Better answers to these questions result in better businesses, able to execute at a higher velocity, and able to function with less internal discord.
• Value-based design is fundamentally connected to high-quality project management. Great designers are defined exclusively by their executional ability. Anyone can prototype something. So what? You’re going to have a lot of things to fix. How? Who? In what order?

As knowledge work restructures itself again, let’s remember that the goal is to optimize for communication dynamics. Let the designers practice design. Let the developers develop. But also recognize that we all need to work together.

As remote work continues to be an absolutely necessary component of business, and as we continue to manage new project work on the internet, communication tools should:

• Be as frictionlessly easy to use as possible. Single taps matter. Tasks that are hard to read are hard to follow.
• Be broadcast as widely as possible. Once new decisions are made, as many people should be looped in as possible. If your project management tool can’t be easily connected to your team chat, you need a new project management tool.
• Be asynchronous and widely understood. Email is poor for this, because people can be left off of chains, and because you can’t fire off simple questions across devices. That’s a very large part of why we strongly prefer contemporary team chatting tools for our day-to-day work.
• Be for all team members, not just some. This is particularly the case for bug & issue trackers, many of which appear to be made exclusively for developers. Instead of favoring these, seek tools that can be used and understood by the whole team.

I’m not going to recommend specific tools in here. They will change day to day. And regardless, you’ll know if you’re stuck on an old platform – or in an old way of working. Rip the band-aid and join the 21st century.