What Shipped: Issue 16

Written by:

Danny White

18th of November 2020

We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process. Here’s what we’ve done in the past few weeks.

Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future worth retiring into. We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in the past few weeks:

  1. New join form Who dis? We launched our new join form, which will underpin more frequent future product updates.
  2. Emergent strategy and buy-in, in-house We’re taking a full team, hands-on approach to defining our strategy.
  3. **Inclusive Language Guide **We’ve put out an open-source, collaborative piece of work.
  4. **System sprints **We’re testing and developing our typography across disciplines.

New join form

Who dis? We launched our new join form, which will underpin more frequent future product updates.

Making an online form is like plumbing: both are difficult, labour intensive, and have end results unnoticed by people until something doesn’t smell right. We’ve just emerged from under the sink to proudly deliver our new join form.

“So what?”, I hear you say. Well, this new form underpins over a year’s work to allow Future Super’s digital interfaces go from the occasional drip of improvements to a full, non-stop, stream.

For the fellow nerds out there: we’ve built this form using Vue, within the same repository as our also-being-plumbed online account interface. Design and engineering have built components, layouts, and (Sass) stylesheets together from the start. That means our ever-evolving visual identity and product ambitions will continue to be prototyped and built-out quickly.

We’re keen to share more about our process soon. Until then, you can find more information about our product ambitions and plans on our public product roadmap.

— Danny

Emergent strategy and buy-in, in-house

We’re taking a full team, hands-on approach to defining our strategy.

Strategy is only ever as good as execution. But if the strategy process doesn’t enable the people executing the work to actually do good work, ya gotta rethink your process. I’ve been thinking about how to get better at building strategy with our team so that we can let our strategy emerge from many perspectives, versus force a perspective on many people. Why: the work will be better if the strategy is formed with and by the people doing the work. You can read more about it here.

— Amanda

Inclusive Language Guide

We’ve put out an open-source, collaborative piece of work.

Full of principles about how we’re thinking about what we say and how we say it, we’re hoping for this guide to be used and built on with other aligned businesses.

For the full write-up of how we got to this point, pop over here.

— Mariela

System sprints

We’re testing and developing our typography across disciplines.

I’ve written before about exploration and testing, but something has been missing from our creative process. We have some distinct disciplines within our team, and although we are all pulling in the same direction, when we looked back on last months output we noticed a few distinct differences in how we are using typography. Our ads are bold and energetic, albeit a little shouty. While our website and socials felt a little more apologetic and at times a little crowded. There’s a few reasons for these slight differences, but in short different disciplines have different conventions and requirements for how they use things like typography.

Yep, we have brand guidelines, but as we continue to make our point of view on the world easier to understand these guidelines need to be more of a moving target than something set in stone. So we’re trying something a bit different. Testing a few tighter rules on our typography for the next month to see if it creates some more consistency across our disciplines.

There’s a chance these small tweaks won’t have a huge impact on how we look and feel, but it will give us a more measurable goal to look back on.

— Nick

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