Melanie navigiert auch im dritten Monat ihres Austauschs die Corona-Untiefen zusammen mit ihrem Gastgeberunternehmer mit festem Tritt. Lest selbst, wie ein klares Mission and Vision Statement einem Unternehmen in dieser schweren Zeit helfen kann.

My third month in Amsterdam is over and as the months before it was an amazing time. We started two new projects within the company and I took over one project as a facilitator. Therefore we tried a new method called “Design Sprint”, invented by Google, to create a testable product or service with very short period of time. Exploring this new method helped me a lot, because I already see a lot of possibilities to offer Design Sprints to public organizations and help them improving or developing new products. For me and the team it was the first time facilitating and participating in a Design Sprint workshop. Therefore, in the beginning, we had two sessions with an external expert, who helped us with our first steps. Now it is up to us to drive the process further. I am super thankful, that I get the chance to deep-dive into this (for us) new methodology and then already test it. This will also help me to facilitate workshops in the future.

Next to this, it was very instructive to see how the company handled the situation during the Corona crisis. It definitely helped, to have a clear vision of the company’s growth path and stick to it (even if some pivoting was necessary). I can only recommend this to every new entrepreneur to think upfront about a concrete vision and mission of the company – as I have seen it right now, at a specific point it can come back to you and then it is absolutely helpful to have a look again on your “roots”. My co-founders and I will definitely spend some time on it the next weeks.

Unfortunately, the Corona virus also hit our upcoming business in Germany very hard. We had several contracts as speakers on events which got all cancelled or postponed. To be honest, this was also kind of demotivating, if you just wanted to start the first steps as a company and get pushed-back that way. Now we are more focusing on the strategic part of building the company – and hopefully soon starting to work with clients.