By David Korhonen

Just the two of us

I spend the last year working beside my colleague in the agency I was on. He was a front-end developer while I was doing the design of websites/web app. We both shared the responsibility of the web pole of the agency, which included time and task management, relation with the client, and so on. But as we had different skills and complementary task to achieve, everything worked fine (well most of the time). And the same goes with school projects I had the previous years.

So I was quite confident in my ability to work with a partner when we started it two weeks ago. But working on having ideas together is so different from what I’m used to.  It’s not about having feedback and discussion around work that has been done but about creating it together. Shouting out your ideas and bounce back on your partner’s one. And this, only this, brings so many challenges.

First one is to commit on ideas that aren’t yet created, babies who look like other babies, a sentence or an approximative scamp. You don’t know how they will look like, and it’s quite hard to communicate it in a way that sells it. And in the end, it’s hard to dare to say it when you feel like it’s the right way to go, but it’s not well defined, or you can’t communicate it. 

Then, depending on your partner, ideas and your daily mindset, bouncing back on ideas can be either super powerful or a complete nightmare. I often end up feeling bad to not being able to help my partners to build/push what they had in mind. Because I either found their idea was great, and I had nothing to add, or I felt like it wasn’t powerful enough and I couldn’t create on it (even though some may have been good ones). And I don’t know what the cause of that was. Is it because I need time to assimilate and think about it? Is it because I have logical bias’ that made me kill my thoughts on it? Or creative blocks / not being used to have ideas that fast?

Anyway, when everything goes well, it is so great feeling you both have the same idea in mind and being able to push it further and further on a few seconds. 

But this was only the first step. You have then to choose which idea to keep and which one to murder wildly. Killing your babies is hard, but killing your partner’s one is much harder, especially when they like it. My only technique so far is not reacting at all — Pokerface style. Silence is telling more than I can for now. And you often come up with many ideas, and they may all have their charm which makes it even more difficult unless you got THE great idea you both agree on.

I guess everything will come up by practising and by finding the right partner to work with.