Trying a new longer form of case study, based around a recent project we undertook. A descriptive and open account of the project, our successes and failures, and how we came together as a team to solve some interesting problems.

Hoping others find this interesting, and also provide insight to any possible future recruits about what a typical large project looks like at MyBuidler.

Indeed. It's constantly shifting, which is why I was curious to take a dip test today, see where peoples heads are at...

Results are in. 52% were happy to work on a single product for a longer period of time. The rest where pretty evenly split between not liking the idea and being unsure. Intend to write blog post about this, I find it very interesting, especially as I'm recruiting a lot at the moment.

For one I'm very happy to see that majority Product Designers seem to relish the opportunity to iterate and improve a product (assuming there's enough interesting work to hold your attention).

Thanks everyone for your participation

Want to know where people stand on the 'Grow/iterate one thing' – 'move around and work on a wide variety' spectrum. I'll post the results back here.

Very much looking forward to speed improvements. The rest is a bit meh for our use case, but is this delivers on performance it will a very welcome update.

Does a good job of capturing Huge's personality. I'm sure their clients would recognise what they know & love about the company in it. I fear however few will get past the homepage as the navigation is completely undiscoverable. Bounce rate on the homepage must be sky-high. Have the nav open when landing and collapse on scroll.

Echo the dislike of scroll-jacking, but it makes the kind of big brand impact their clients will want to see. It has a limited target audience who they're trying to wow. Impressive speed!

Case study carrousels? Let me scroll please. One way ticket to ensuring most of your work is never seen.

I like how everything is HUGE :) Looks pretty gorgeous though.

Have you tried different Wacom pen setups? I have button 1 to be pan/scroll - so it's really fast to move around. Button 2 is set to right click. Tap is obviously left click.

Past setups have included just using a modifier key to pan/scroll and having the two buttons a double & right click.

On this episode Jon & Dan take a listener question. Steve Cowburn writes in to ask:

“Why do people start their own companies, given that the rewards and workload can be tough? What is that 'certain something' that we get out of doing it for ourselves?”

To answers Steve’s questions, Jon & Dan cover the following topics:

• What was the initial decision process in starting our agencies - what led us to take the plunge?
• What was the turning point where it first felt like a business and an agency?
• Working on our first ‘product’ and finding our niche
• What were the first things that began to highlight how hard it can be to run a business
• Doing the first business activities as new founders
• Who did we look towards as inspiration - who could we learn from?
• What was our fallback plan?
• Business and personal milestones that forced us to make decisions
• Hiring the first employee
• What do rewards do we get from it personally
• What are the purely financial rewards?
• Working hard and what you need to put in
• If for some reason we no longer had our companies, what would we do next?

Listen to the episode now

This week Jon is joined by Dan to talk about how we manage your time and feel productive while running our agencies. It’s a hard thing to quantify and we feel every business and person running them are different. But we talk about what works for us, along with what doesn’t.

In this episode they discuss:

- How the problems changes as you begin to scale

- Various tools we use to manage team

- Abiding by systems or not?

- Understand what you have achieved rather than not achieved

- Tracking your activity and productivity

- Email etiquette, and when to allow it in

- Meetings; good or bad?

- Coming away feeling good

- Diversifying task types and being realistic

Listen now

My father's name, but no relation ;)