## The future is now, old man

I bet right now you are sitting in the office or at home, thinking about how it would be possible to work, but also to travel. This is a great opportunity to live your life as a *local*, to enjoy the everyday life of people in different places that gives an amazing perspective on how you can walk, how you live and how you think in a different environment. It gives an opportunity to develop our minds, skills and business ideas.

In general, there are a few ways. The first one is obvious - just take a vacation. Plan a flight, go on your own or take a few friends and enjoy the cities. You have two choices - go on shorter trips (like the typical 1-2-week vacation), so the costs are not going to kill you if you want to enjoy the place to the fullest. Another choice is to go for a longer, e.g. 4-week vacation. However, this can be either costly or not simply possible in your company.

The second option is to work remotely. This would be the perfect thing to do if you live alone. Complications start when you think about bringing your partner and/or kids. If your partner cannot work remotely, you can consider not working at all (sometimes it actually makes sense) or being on vacation, however we now go back to square one - sometimes long vacations are not possible, or they don’t make much sense.

There is a third option. What if I told you that you can work in a regular company with a nice office, but be able to go to an exotic place for 4 weeks AND be able to work from there AND be able to take your partner with just the cost of a plane ticket AND the accommodation does not cost you a single cent/penny/whatever AND you can go together with your friends from work?

That’s what we do, here in AppUnite, a software development company and it’s called **WORKATION**. 

![Working](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/fdc6ce4e/a68d/d29yazJfbGFwdG9wLmpwZw==)

This is actually our second workation, you can read about our first workation in Chang Mai, Thailand [here](https://appunite.com/blog/appunite-workation-introduction) and [here](https://medium.com/@piotrbernad/workation-in-thailand-a-win-for-the-appunite-a-big-win-for-myself-37ba3aaacb1c).

## Set and setting

Let’s start from the beginning. The rules are simple:
* we decide together where to go for a few months,
* you can take a chance and book your workation for 4 weeks,
* you can take your partner,
* we work as usual, from 9 to 5, and then have time for ourselves,
* AppUnite covers accommodation expenses and half of your ticket price.

This year, we started with a simple poll, asking our coworkers: “based on [NomadList](https://nomadlist.com/) (so having in mind rational costs of living), choose up to 3 go-to places for this year workation”. The discussion was hot and full of ideas. After a few days the choice was clear - Tenerife. AWESOME!

Do you have any idea how big the challenge is to find a house for 8-10 people on Tenerife for half a year? We found out that it was simply impossible, so we moved to the next choice in our poll - Lisbon, Portugal. ALSO AWESOME!

A few weeks of searching and we got it. An enormous 5-bedroom house in the suburbs with a swimming pool, a billiard table, a gym and orange trees. A fifteen-minute walk from the ocean. The choice was easy - booked.

## The journey began

As a small group of 3 pioneers, we arrived at the airport, rented a tiny Hyundai and moved into the house with a lot of luggage. On the next morning, we were able to experience the full potential of this place - beautiful, quiet and close to the city. Our next plans were simple - work hard and play hard. We put all our effort into making the work as good as in the office, which was not an easy task for me personally as a project manager, and live the lives of simple, Portuguese locals to the fullest. Life literally gave us lemons.

## The typical week

It is a very individual matter how to make the best of workation. Some people want to travel a lot, some people just want to live like locals and some just want to be there. Workation gives you the possibility to do it the way you like. Just remember, it’s always better to plan something with other residents, as it’s always more fun to do something together. Our plan, together with my fiancée, was to travel and enjoy many faces of Portugal. This required being well-organized.

A typical working day was quite simple. You have to book about 8 hours of work to make sure that you are not going to be left behind with anything, and the work goes as planned. The morning routine was absolutely brilliant. You wake up and start preparing some breakfast with coffee, pastel de nata and orange juice from fresh oranges straight from the trees. The morning feels just great. The weather is nice and warm, so you can go out near the pool to hear the birds singing and make yourself comfortable for the start.

In the house, there were many workplaces to suit the needs of everybody. Starting from a big table in the dining room (my favourite), to couches in the living room, a private office upstairs and a big table near the pool. It was more than enough for us to have some “private space” and be able to focus.

When the work was done, we were usually doing some chillout stuff around the house. Typically hanging out by the pool, reading, watching Netflix or lying on a beach near the ocean. It was a bit too difficult to move around to Lisbon city center as our house was over an hour away from the city.

![Surfing](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/81d449c1/8153/d29yazJfc3VyZi5qcGVn)

On Friday mornings, our main focus was to get to the city or even beyond it. The adventure usually started 10 minutes from our house. On a bus stop, where we were trying to hitchhike and most of the time with a lot of luck. The road near our house was going straight from the beach (one of the most popular near Lisbon) to the city center. It was easy to catch a ride. If that was not the case, we always had a quite frequent bus that took us to port, so we could jump on a ferry. Within 10 minutes, a ferry was taking us to the sweet spot of the city.

Travelling around is effortless, there is only 1 card that you can top up with a few euros to use for any tram, bus, ferry or train. It’s a bit expensive, but totally worth it and allowed us to see a few places around like Sintra or Cascais. For longer distances, like a trip to Fatima, we rented a car. There are many ways to travel, especially when you are in the country and the only thing on your mind is the question “where should I go today’?

When the weekend was done, we were going back to our house by bus or Uber to had some rest before a new week. 

What would be your perfect week? [Join us](https://jobs.appunite.com/) and write your own story. We created a small sum-up video here, so you can see how we spent workation.

<iframe id="video" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vITJnH_zCRI" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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Get to know our solution for the perfect balance between getting the job done and visiting places.


Workation 2.0 - How we work and travel without compromises

## Overview

Developing products is a very complex process. It always starts with an idea or vision. Our job at AppUnite is to help you fulfill this vision. We use different techniques and one of them is called a Design Sprint. Originally designed by Google to validate an idea by testing a prototype of the service. Our goal for the Design Sprint, that I will show you today, was to validate our idea for the product to solve a particular problem - empower new & current users to engage more in an app. 

The basic questions that we pose when we start designing a new product are:
* why do we do it?
* how is it exactly going to work?
* how do we know that we create features that matter?
* who is actually going to use our product?

These questions start the process and they are with us the whole time. They benefit the most if they are discussed together with the whole team that will be responsible for building your product - not just the project manager. In our teams, we work with you (as a client), project managers/product owners (that feel responsible for the overall outcome), designers, developers and QA engineers. All of them have their own unique perspective of products as they are responsible for different elements. Our meeting was attended by: Jakub - CEO of Visual Panda (Graphic Design Studio) who was running the meeting, graphic designer, project manager, android developer, iOS developer and a QA engineer.

When we engage all of them at the early stage, we save ourselves a lot of effort later on, as we don’t have to explain the whole vision. Everybody knows why we do it and how we do it.

## The process

Our team met for 2 days and set up a few workshops. Unfortunately, the client was participating in our workshops only at the begging, highlighting an overall vision and challenges that they are facing. The process started with checking status of a current product (if you have one). In this case it was our main product, a social network app, with 120k active users monthly.

After 2 days of Design Sprint, we, as a team, did the following workshops:
* **Understanding the current status** (statistics of the product right now)
![Dashboard](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/adc1d13f/4574/aW1hZ2VfcHJldmlldy5wbmc=)
After understanding where we are right now in terms of active users, their engagement, place where they spend most of the time in the app and user details like region or operating system, we will be able to decide on success metrics. By building a new product, we should understand **what it means for the product to succeed**. Building the success metrics can also be done using different approaches, [Pirate Metrics](https://medium.com/@ms.mbalke/aarrr-framework-metrics-that-let-your-startup-sound-like-a-pirate-ship-e91d4082994b) are one of the possibilities, but this, of course, depends on what you need.

* **Understanding what the goal for the new product is.**
![Goal](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/b82995a1/818d/aW1hZ2VfcHJldmlldyAoMSkucG5n)
Understanding the goal is a really important element. It all starts with a client that describes the world that they see and how they feel about users’ needs, what users do right now, what they need, how they communicate the needs and what the background is (social, political, environmental etc.). It’s all about trying to explain the perspective and knowledge of a client to the team that will work on the product. After about half an hour of intense discussion, we defined our goal for our product to be as in the example above. We want it to be used as a newer tool to increase engagement. This goal was a sentence that we had always written in capital letters, somewhere in our room. During workshops and brainstorming, the accumulation of ideas is so intense, that it is easy to get lost in the flow. Having a clear goals will always help us to get on track.

* **Defining what types of users we will have in our product and creating a flow of how these users are potentially going to use our product**
![Users](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/9b89b159/d216/aW1hZ2VfcHJldmlldy0yLmpwZWc=)
Ok, so we started with a vision, but now it’s time to think (assume) who is actually going to use our product. It was not exactly like creating [personas](https://medium.com/beakerandflint/personas-74c4e1c12ee2) - the point of this workshop is not to define the “parameters” of a user, but think a little bit in more general terms, about how and why they will use our product. If we are able to clearly define the general “paths” of a user, it will be easier to define product flows. Defining who is going to be a user in our product will help us understand how they are going to use it, what their needs will be and what they will try to achieve. The ultimate goal for each of the user types that we have is to build interaction. It is important to notice, that our type of user is more like a hat, and one user can wear many hats or change them depending on a situation.

* **Listing many possible problems and needs of those users and dividing them into categories**
![Categories](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/28c619e4/e01c/aW1hZ2VfcHJldmlldyAoMikucG5n)
As a follow-up from previous exercise, we need to dig deeper into needs and problems of particular user types. First, we try to anticipate needs and then we try to categorise them.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I would say that this is a typical brainstorming session, when we write on the post-it notes whatever comes to our minds, however tight or loosely it’s connected with our users. The goal here is to get a perspective on how your teammates look at those user types. The more diverse team you have, the better, as each teammate that comes from different background (development, marketing, QA, management etc) will have their own knowledge and perspective on our users.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For us, the categories were: Product, Content Consumption, Good UX, Advertising, Joining the platform, Making Money, Creating Content, Making Interactions.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As you can see, the categories itself are general and touch very typical elements of any product. 

* **Prioritising problems and needs (votes with blue and pink arrows)**
Priorities are the key. If you look at the photo above, you will notice blue and pink arrows. The team gathered to vote with blue arrows on whatever they feel is important while the client was given a “supervote”, that can influence next workshops. This workshop is correlated with understanding the goal and show if there is a difference in thinking between a client and a team.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In the example above, we pointed the following.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1. helping to create and publish content 6
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2. increasing interactions between users 3 1
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3. making it easier to find interesting spaces 3
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4. making every space unique 1
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5. helping users use app everyday 1
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;6. making spaces available publicly online 1

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As you can see, we have a divergence between a client and a team - how did this happen? The client and a team looked at the problem in a slightly different way, while both we and our client understand the outcome (increase interaction), we targeted the cause - without a good way to create and publish the content in our product, it will be difficult to increase interaction. This became our main point of focus later on.

* **Connecting priority problems and needs with user flows and deciding on success metrics**
![Engage](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/9a79c78e/1de3/aW1hZ2VfcHJldmlldy0zLmpwZWc=)

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;**We marked the most important elements of flow:**
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1. making every space unique → in **describing space**
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2. helping to create and publish content → in **creates content**
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3. increasing interaction between users → in goal **INTERACTION**
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4. making it easier to find interesting spaces → in **browse spaces**

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;**The success metrics are:**
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1. Number of shared & added posts to product
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2. Session time duration
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3. Number of interactions on posts

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;This is just a simple activity to visually show where our needs connect to our users and the flows we created.

* **Deciding what element of the flow is the most important to test**

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Together, we decided that creating content is the most important one. If a user is able to create an interesting content easily and with pleasure, that will make them more eager to stay and engage. This comes out directly from our prioritizing activity.

* **Researching other competitors’ products that are created around the decided flow element**
![Research](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/b9c5493b/c6f6/aW1hZ2VfcHJldmlldyAoMykucG5n)
Now, as we are beginning to approach the actual product design phase the fun begins,. The first step is always the same - we researched a few different apps on how they help users to create content. The exemplary apps were Tumblr, Talklife, Ted, Whisper, OLX, Vinted, Instagram, Facebook, Jodel, Tapatalk, Werble, Adobe Spark Post, Aminocreator. The findings and propositions were drawn on post-it notes and discussed by the team. Thanks to this workshop, we see what we like and what draws our attention.

* **Creating individual propositions how to design the flow element and deciding what elements of these propositions we love**
![Propositions](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/016eb26c/cf00/aW1hZ2VfcHJldmlldyAoNCkucG5n)
This was one of the hardest parts of the workshop - a timebox activity (20 minutes) to prepare a prototype. This activity consisted of 5 steps.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1. Creating your initial proposition (we don’t stop here, see below)
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2. Doing a “[crazy 8’s](https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com/methodology/phase3-sketch/crazy-eights)” session 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3. Drawing your final proposition
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4. Discussing
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5. Deciding on what’s cool and what’s not in each proposition.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[*The first thoughts are not always the best ones*](https://www.fastcompany.com/3033567/brainstorming-doesnt-work-try-this-technique-instead)

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Each member created their unique vision of the product. There were many different ideas so we voted with blue arrows on the ones that we liked the most to be used in our new flow. The process of constant iteration over ideas is the key of the design sprint.

* **Merging propositions in a user flow that contains selected features**
![Merge](https://appunite-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/images/7863bfe1/5d2e/aW1hZ2VfcHJldmlldy01LmpwZWc=)
This is one of the most important and most difficult outcomes - we mapped the journey of a user from the start (seeing an advertised post on our mother-product), through elements like first opening of the app, login, creating content, publishing content and ending with our goal → sharing content. It’s the most difficult as we have to take all the perspectives, needs, flows and ideas and just put that into a single flow (it’s good if it fits 15 screens, as in the example). This flow adds a perspective to our proposed solution to think once more if this fits not only our product, but also our life.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Based on this flow, we created a simple prototype that will be tested with a client and users **to help us decide if the flow we created meets real life needs and expectations and what we can learn from it.**

## Conclusions
The structure of the design sprint helped us to narrow it down from a very broad context of the product to a testable element that is clearly defined and has its position in our flow.

The next step is not to start development, but to learn if our thinking is correct. To test our assumptions and hypothesis. To get data on the tests.

The way we were following the steps of the design sprint encouraged discussion on many levels of the product and helped us to dive deep into the problem. We had to switch our thinking to “how do we know if we do the right thing?”. The learning process and iterations are the key. When you acknowledge that there are things you don’t know and you look for a way to find out if you are right or wrong, when you learn from it, that’s where the innovations happen.

That’s how best products are born.
If you'd like to talk about your product, [let us know](https://appunite.com/briefs).

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