Community Projects

How does Deep Work currently work?
Technical teams work together with Deep Work experts to design new products with their technology.
Technical teams work together with Deep Work experts to design new products with their technology.
Deep Work is a distributed product design studio that helps highly technical teams align on a specific product idea, collaborate on an MVP, design a prototype and user test it in order to check for product market fit. Our internal processes (e.g. the Hypersprint) streamline all creative collaboration and decision making, which minimises the time it takes to create a new product to only a few days. In comparison, similar results take weeks or months in even the most advanced companies like Spotify or Google.
The process is applicable to almost any type of creative collaboration. It works for digital products, physical products, presentations, business strategies, short films, tabletop games and even organisational structures. All while working remotely, exchanging knowledge across all participants along the way and always having a high quality outcome that is more impactful than the sum of its parts!
So much for what we do, now let's look at what you can do!
What are community projects?
So far, Deep Work consists of two founders and several contractors/Experts who collaborate on projects for clients. This work allows us to generate revenue and set aside part of it for exploration of new ideas and pay others to help us with tasks.
But there are also fans and friends of ours, members of our Discord and a handful of beautiful people who sometimes give us advice and even help us get tasks done faster. There's a very high chance that you belong to at least one of those groups!
With the Community Hypersprint, we want to use our client-facing process to bring together our community and prototype new products which may or may not become part of our Deep Work ecosystem.
After the Community Hypersprint, we use the results to run and with it experiment for a month, see if enough members are eager to implement the idea or maybe make it an actual product.
Who is responsible for and can take part in Community projects?
Community Hypersprints are open for participation by anyone in the Deep Work Community. The creator of the winning proposal in the #proposals channel is responsible for sharing the idea and has the role of a decider if they decide to take part in it. 
All other decision-making is up to Collaborators, who are interested in taking part. They can join and lead facilitation, design the prototype or run user interviews. The exact organization and delegation of work is up to the participants to decide at the start of the first workshop.
What do I have from participating?
We think running a project with you would be a cool idea, but we also want you to leave the experience with a positive outcome. There are several ways how you will benefit from the experience:
You will take an active part in creating a new type of product
Most organizations follow structures, which have worked for factories established in the industrialization, but created more and more problems for humans as we went through technological changes in the information age. We are all striving for a work-life balance and do meaningful work, yet only a small fraction of employees in current companies is able to do it.
With the Community Hypersprints we want to do fulfilling and compensated work in a real environment but at low risk of messing up. In fact, mistakes will always happen here and are meant to improve everyone.
You will learn hyper-efficient methods for creative collaboration
The Hypersprint is an example of the most efficient creative collaboration regardless of geolocation. During our work, you will experience how we work and will be able to learn how to apply our processes in your own collaboration with your friends, your own teams or on our client projects. Our teaching material is online for free, but during our work you will learn hands-on how it works.
You will receive part of our monthly community budget
Every month, we set aside a certain amount of our revenue to a fund for collaborators. As Deep Work grows over time, so will the fund. Soon we will also distribute tokens based on community activity, which will represent shares of this fund. These details haven't been decided on yet though, so please take them with a grain of salt.
Currently, after our projects we will issue each participant a certain amount for participation. The monthly budget will be paid out like this:
33% shared among all workshop participants 33% shared among all product designers 33% shared among all user interviewers
You will also work on a real challenge with interesting people
In the process you will also learn more about Deep Work, get to know other nice people in our community and have an enjoyable time working on something cool. Every month the problem is different and every month the group of participants might be different and have different skills.
How much time does it take?
The project is split into two collaborative workshops, two days of prototyping and one day for user testing. After that, we get together again and present the results. You can also check it on this calendar.
Day 1: Workshop, 2-3 hours Align and decide on a common goal, do research and share it. This part is important to make decisions about what we work on.
Offline: Concept Sketching, ~1 hour Create individual concepts that could help us reach this goal. This part is very creative and fun.
Day 2: Workshop, 2 hours Combine the best ideas from the individual concepts into one "prototype". This part is the most significant for the result - we will make final decisions and create something like wireframes.
Ideally you should take part in all workshops. If you don't have the time to take part in all of then, feel free to choose which sessions you think are the most valuable or interesting to you.
Day 3+4: Prototyping
This can take as long as you want, but the goal is to be finished with a prototype to test on the following day
Day 5: User Testing
For user testing, we need to find 5 testers, interview them and observe whether the prototype works and reaches the goal the team decided on Day 1.
Getting started
Use this Miro template to walk through the workshop:
​https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lZEayzU=/​