#openprocess

Yesterday I facilitated a kickoff at CoWork. We're redesigning coworkgreenville.com. Our kickoff lasted only two hours and involved Aeryk, Matthew, Dan, Chandler, Justin, Robert, and myself. Here's a picture. 

A lot goes into a kickoff, and even more goes into preparing for it. Aeryk completed a pretty extensive branding exercise which landed us somewhere profitably further down the road, but still apart from what we feel is our final destination. Aeryk is CoWork's first intern. Lucky, lucky Aeryk. 

I've decided to blog the entirety of my experiences with this project. Win, lose, or fail. There is no draw.

The CoWork Greenville website has been through many different iterations. The reasons are largely beside the point. Today we stand, and we are new. Since July, CoWork is reinvented. We have lost familiar faces, kept old ones, and gained new ones.

My self-given mandate with the redesign is a simple one, albeit difficult. Coordinate the complete creation of a new coworkgreenville.com that accurately depicts what CoWork is today. Here are what the official roles involved look like:

Matthew - Art Direction and Design Direction

Aeryk - Design Production

Myself - Production, IA, UX, content strategy, front end code, back end code, anything else

That's the brutal side of being a Producer. I have two people committed to the project. Anything they can't do, I'm responsible for. I don't know any code. 

As a team, we completed an adequate amount of work leading up to preparations for the kickoff. Here's what we had:

Lots and lots of conversations about the site.

A cobbler's children version of the site that's live now.

Several detailed brainstorm drawings as the outcome of those many conversations. Completed by Matthew, Chris, and myself.

Multiple rounds of branding concept work culminating in this deck completed by Aeryk. He's tread the unenviable path of teaching the CoWork owners that we are bad clients.

A failed Basecamp project that included two posts. The first was a tech stack discussion. The second was titled "kill this thread?".

Armed with this, I set the groundwork for the kickoff. Here are the pieces I assembled:

A CoWork pitch deck--yet unfinished and still plagiarizing my sources. 

Production Process concept doc.

Consolidated highlights of current analytics.

Kickoff Agenda.

15-Second Gut Check Template and Source doc (Matthew contributed a few links for the source doc).

A Slack channel.

Breakfast and coffee from Swamp Rabbit Cafe. Ordered, picked up, and arrayed at CoWork morning-of.

All of this is beside a lot of thinking by members of the community at large about what a good site would be for us. We have a complicated message for some people in our audience, and a simple one for others. That's another standing principle of producing projects:

I spend a lot of time talking and thinking about things that may or may not ever happen...and usually don't happen in the fashion that I first imagine. 

The Kickoff went really well. We didn't have everyone I thought we would, but we had a few people I didn't expect as well. That's also part of the difficulty of running community projects, I never know who will be interested or involved--but the work must happen.

Here's a fun insight into the outcome of the gut check exercise. The rankings are based on whether each site is a good fit for CoWork, not on whether it's a good site in and of itself. The design studio session yielded a lot of good conversation and sketches. I'm not sure how I will document that for the team to absorb and react to moving forward. In my past lives that exercise has been mostly a dog and pony show. It felt much more real with my crew. Maybe I should find a way to record that and hold us accountable to it?