It’s been blisteringly hot in London recently.
I mean, it’s been blisteringly hot in loads of places, but that’s not the point.
The point is, I’ve had to expose my calves.
But still, I count myself lucky because here at Velocity towers we have air conditioning.
The trouble is, when you’ve got a load of different people all in the same room and you give them some sense of agency over temperature, there’s going to be tension.
An unspoken tug-of-war breaks out. Every few minutes the temperature becomes unbearable (in one direction or the other) and more buttons are pressed.
I message Dave, our head of Dev (yes, his name’s pretty similar to what he does. He seems cool with it), and I say: “Dude, I wish there was a way that we could just all give our preferences and let the aircon figure it out”.
Dave shoots back: “hahaha that’s brilliant” followed swiftly by “and soooo doable with a lil google sheet form combo. Vote for aircon via slack with a :snowflake: or a :fire:”
And that’s why I’m such a massive fan of Dave.
Because he’s not just a dude who makes websites.
He’s a dude with this killer bunch of skills who you Slack a joke and he replies with a solution.
And he lives in this state.
Dave’s code
The first time I ever met Dave, he told me about his ethos of ‘Dev can help’.
There are loads of problems out there that B2B web developers can solve that you wouldn’t even think to talk to them about. And Dave really wants you to talk to him about them.
You’re having difficulty using Marketo?
Yeah, Dave looks at it, figures out that the back-end isn’t user friendly, and creates a WordPress plugin so you can control your Marketo from within WordPress.
It’s brilliant. It totally changes the game for content marketing. And it’s something a writer wouldn’t think of in a million years.
And the entire Dev team is like this.
They make these brilliant ROI calculators that take whole spreadsheets worth of content and turn them into a feature that’s a pleasure to use.
What’s more, they figure out what it means when someone makes an ROI calculator that doesn’t say what they want it to say.
We’ve had it in the past that people have turned up (proverbially) at the door of Velocity towers holding the mangled frame of an interactive tool, desperation in their eyes, and Dev have helped.
That’s a situation no writer, no matter how choppy their chops, could write their way out of.
The rise of the B2B web developers
We get all sorts of businesses with all sorts of problems coming to us at Velocity.
The answer used to be well-written, beautifully designed content.
But now it’s so much more than that – it’s complex integrations across disparate systems, processes that need to be designed with best practice baked in, complicated user journeys in sites that may or may not grow dramatically…
Writers and designers and planners have big, important roles to play in a lot of those. But sometimes there are things you didn’t even know could be solved.
And in those instances, usually, Dev can help.