When ECQ was announced in mid-March, we shut the studio's physical workspace within forty-eight hours and moved everyone home. We had no playbook for it. Sixty days later, we are still shipping. Some of what we expected to be hard has been easy. Some of what we expected to be easy has been brutal. Here is the honest write-up while it is still fresh.
What turned out to be easier than expected
Remote engineering is mostly fine. We were already running distributed for international clients, so the engineering rhythm did not change much. Standups moved to a video call. Code review continued in GitHub PRs. Pair programming moved to screen-shared sessions over Meet. The work shipped.
Onboarding new clients remotely turned out to be workable. We had assumed discovery had to be in person to get the right signal. It turned out a structured video call, plus a shared document the client could co-edit live, plus a follow-up async loop, captured the same information. Some clients preferred it. Their executives could drop into the relevant fifteen minutes instead of blocking a full afternoon.
Async written communication forced us to write things down more clearly. The studio's internal documentation got better in two months than it had in the previous two years. Decisions that used to live in someone's head ended up in our shared knowledge base, where they belong.
What has been harder than expected
The first week of new engagements is harder remotely. There is a sort of tacit information transfer that happens when a team and a client are in the same room for two days at kickoff. We have not fully replicated that async. We are compensating by adding a structured week-zero phase to engagements: more written context, a shared one-page operating doc, and a deliberate "ask anything" video session at the end of the first week. It helps. It does not replace.
Junior engineers struggle more than seniors. Seniors know what to do with ambiguity. Juniors look up for cues and there is no one across the room to give them. We have leaned harder on written task descriptions, more explicit acceptance criteria, and short daily one-on-ones with anyone newer than six months at the studio. Productivity is recovering, slowly.
Sales conversations stalled in March and only just resumed in April. We had thought referral inbound would carry us. It mostly did, but with a longer cycle: prospects took weeks to make decisions they would have made in days. We adjusted the pipeline assumptions and started writing more publicly to fill the top of the funnel.
What clients want right now
Two patterns have emerged in the last sixty days, both worth noting.
First, e-commerce demand is real. Businesses that had relied on physical foot traffic are urgently building direct online channels. Some of them want a turnkey solution; we point those toward Shopify and a careful PH payment integration. Others have catalog or fulfillment complexity that Shopify will not cover, and those become custom builds. The volume of these inquiries is the highest we have seen.
Second, internal-tools work is rising. With teams now distributed, the ad-hoc spreadsheets and on-site whiteboard processes that ran small businesses no longer scale. We are building unglamorous but valuable internal dashboards, approval workflows, and reporting tools. These are not the projects we expected to be central to 2020. They have become central to 2020.
How our process changed
A few permanent shifts.
We now scope every project assuming remote-first delivery, even when clients say they prefer onsite. Onsite becomes a layer on top of a remote-default process, not the other way around. This makes us more resilient if anyone, anywhere, has to suddenly work from home again.
We have rebuilt our written deliverables. Every project ships with a hand-off document that assumes the receiving team will read it without us in the room. This was not strict before. It is strict now.
We are publishing more. Not because we suddenly have marketing budget, but because the inbound pipeline now needs better top-of-funnel visibility than referrals alone provide. The studio's blog is part of that, and you are reading the result.
What we do not yet know
We do not know whether the project mix shifts back when restrictions ease, or whether e-commerce and internal-tools demand stays at this level. We do not know how many of our clients will survive 2020 financially. We do not know what the studio's hiring runway looks like by year-end.
What we do know is that the work is still there, the team is still intact, and the discipline of writing things down has made us a better studio than the one that started March.
If you are figuring out what to build during a strange year, talk to us before you commit to anything large. The honest answer might be smaller than you think.