Before I dive into the rest of this newsletter, I want to thank you all for being part of Deep Work. It is an exploration of the unknown and project by project we are uncovering principles for healthier, happier, and more autonomous ways of working together.
For the last year, we have been using Deep Teams to manage ourselves and keep track of projects and payments. I’m excited to share a few basic insights below (thanks @Denis for hooking up Grafana!).
First, I will show you roughly what we know and track. Then, I will summarise what we are still missing in order to become a self-sustainable organization on an impersonal scale (where not everyone knows each other personally anymore).
What we already know
As shown here, it is possible to manage projects in a for-profit company that consists of autonomous individuals, projects, and teams. Everyone works together towards the same goal, with a shared high standard for quality.
First of all, here are all transactions from each project we marked as “Gross profit” that went to the treasury in 2023, it’s the revenue of Deep Work:
We currently have a total of 194 registered users on Deep Teams:
29 of them are “Experts“ at Deep Work, i.e. they own at least one and at most 27 roles:
Here is how much money went to which exact role. While the data shows that we can reasonably call ourselves a design studio in 2023, we also built software:
If you own multiple roles, this could give you a clue as to what work was in high demand last year and how that might change next year.
With our new data system, we can also zoom in. Here is how the Product Designer role payments looked month-to-month:
DEEP tokens are still an experiment. They are currently issued for long-term contributions and are only used to give you access to the #governance channel in Discord. Here are the roles we decided that have a long-term impact:
For the record, the roles “Creative Director Consultancy” and “Finance Director” have been deprecated earlier in the year, and “Representatives” will be merged into one.
Here you can see which teams created a project, completed it, and spent time reviewing the results. Higher numbers = more “learning”
How roles have been paid relative to each project:
Here are the roles that have been used in projects the most, regardless of compensation:
And lastly, below are the projects with the highest number of individual team members. If you were part of any, you might have a sense of how the number of team members affected the collaboration experience:
Please consider that this is just the first version of the collected data. The granularity and quality of insights will improve as we keep working together.
I’m sharing it with you so we can better understand ourselves as an organization and continuously find ways of improving ourselves together. Also, in order to be able to make better decisions individually.
By the way, we’re at about 153 subscribers of this newsletter:
What we still need to work on
That said, there is still a lot of work to do. While the above shows us how stable (and needed) we are with what we do, what is missing from our infrastructure entirely are processes for financial control and business management to also visualize financial stability.
I’m planning to adjust my workflow to share monthly reports about the financial aspect and start paying closer attention to our profit margins and expenses. I will also make my collaboration with Colin more explicit and focus on creating a treasury management policy.
Over the last month (excluded from the data above) we started to explore more work for the consultancy with new types of collaborative advisory projects, creative alignment sessions in person, and organizational design. In-person meetings and small events that make our guests feel at home also seemed to have a positive impact on our community.
Reflecting on how we evolved last year makes me feel impressed with the progress we made. And it was only possible because we trust each other, decide to do what we love and act on what we think is right.
I love you all, thank you for being you.
Let's go into 2024.