100 days! I started to work for Vitamina in a middle of a pandemic crisis, so I didn’t have the opportunity to meet anyone physically. It was difficult in the beginning to get all the processes and the specifications from the clients since a lot of information was shared during the first weeks.

Working remotely is a day-by-day challenge, with a mix of benefits and limitations. Without a good and united team, it wouldn’t be easy to adapt to this “new normal”, but everything is possible when we have the right mood. Even though I haven’t had the opportunity to meet my colleagues, sometimes I feel I’ve been with them in the recent past.

If someone asked me for one advice about starting to work for a digital marketing agency during COVID-19, I would immediately say: give yourself time to learn and take a deep breath.

It’s not supposed for you to begin a new job with full knowledge of the processes. This is a new relationship between you and a new company and, to build it, there is a whole process to go through.

After 3 months, I feel more confident, integrated, and challenged to work with different clients every day. Even without knowing, some of them were already present in my life, which turned out to be a funny coincidence.

I would also take this opportunity to acknowledge my colleagues who were always patient and ready to help when I was lost. Besides them, the beginning of this journey wouldn’t also be the same without Zoe (my puppy), always ready to jump to my legs during some meetings.

My last advice? Face your life with a smile because we never know what will happen in the next second.

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Diogo Santos, Copywriter

SET UP

The question in my mind for a good 2 days while I was letting this book sit there on my coffee table was: Why should I read it?

I’m not starting my own business or managing a team, I’m between jobs leaving a company that I love which couldn’t love me in return for a job in the stressful world of a digital agency. And so, I felt that there were more accurate books that would be more helpful in that moment.

However, one day (while I quickly ran out of other things to do - that were sooo major) I started reading the first paragraph in the book. And two weeks later, I had devoured the whole thing.

THE HOOK

Rework is all about asking the right questions. Although, you might think that does not apply to you, it does. If you are part of an industry, of a company, if you are a CEO, a freelancer or an intern you should read this book.

Rework makes you think about your behavior in the workplace and questions your attitude towards different problems. The solutions might not be what you are looking for but what’s key is the crucial questions it raises.

MUNDANE CONCLUSIONS

Business plans are trash, long meetings are the plague, the phrase “long-term strategy” means nothing and the ideal work week has between 10 and 40 hours in it. Yep. You read that right.

The authors live by the premises in the book, it’s their guide and has help them found a small company that every year makes millions of dollars which is 37 signals.

Here’s my take away from their philosophy:

Develop something that you would want to use on your daily life.

Start with something that could solve your personal problems or your work problems.
Focus on doing one thing right.

Failure it’s not a premise for success, learning from mistake is overrated.
Problems usually have simple solutions.

Don’t sweat more than you have to. You usually know what the consequences are, deal with them. Be open, humble and transparent.
Meetings are toxic.

If a meeting is mandatory then something concrete must come out of it.
The time to launch is now not later.

An ideal setting is never going to happen. Find out soon rather than later if your idea works.
Before hiring for a specific area, do the job yourself.

Then you know what works and what to expect from your employee.

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SEE ALSO: Why having a content strategy matters? Rework preaches what worked for the authors: a revolutionary work philosophy that focuses on personal satisfaction, productivity and the pursuit of an ideal.

‍It’s up to you to take away the conclusions that might really work for you.

Our web designer, Rui Bogas, has a really strong opinion about how you should bond with your clients. See if you agree!Clients are not evil, they are just taking care of their business.SEE ALSO: DESIGN FOR YOUR CLIENTS, NOT FOR YOU

Every time we start a new project, we have to put ourselves in other people’s shoes in order to understand what are their main concerns and find a way to solve their problems, but there’s a thing that we seem to forget sometimes and we seem to be most afraid of (even more than our final users). I’m talking about clients.

Of course there are all kinds of clients all over the world, but why do we feel afraid of them most of the times? In a matter of fact, they run their business and they want to succeed. But just like the steps we take to discover what our user wants, why don’t we force ourselves to understand our clients deeper and build a better relationship with them? What if we were in the same situation as them? What would be our needs? What do we value and we would like to see in other companies that we work with? How can I trust in those companies?

These are some important questions, but there’s a lot more that we need to ask in order to put ourselves in their shoes. If we were on their side, I’m sure we would do the same thing.

Why to put ourselves in their shoes?

First of all, we need to meet our clients and get to know them as much as possible. What does he like? What’s the most important for him?

Then we can think about some questions like: What does he really want to do? What’s the work all about? Why would he even think about that? Why not? How can it benefit his business? And so on…

Getting to know the client can be extremely powerful and that’s when they start to feel confident about us. It’s a great way to introduce ourselves and show him how do we work and which are the procedures. Here’s where our key point comes in! What about if instead of only showing him what we do, we integrate him in the work process in order to work towards the same goal?

That way it will help us understand his point of view and he will understand our way of work, experiencing working along with us.

Here at Vitamina., we are starting to do that and the results are showing. The only way to improve our work and deliver a product that solves real problems is through collaboration with clients and there’s nobody that understand their business better than themselves and at the same time, we are “designing for our client, not for us.”

The main advantages of working together

Working together with our clients will help us building a better and healthier relationship between us, we will be able to fulfill their needs, so that we can create more opportunities to work with them in the future.

‍Together, we can create better products with a better user experience, that solve real problems for every user's needs.

‍This is not an easy task, because every client is different, but with a lot of practice we start to get some results and provide more value for our clients, only this way we can be valuable.

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