Our Professional Moment of Truth

We’re relaxed going into the executive review of a major project. So what could go wrong?

A long time ago in an industry far away we worked for this unscrupulous creative scam artist software entrepreneur. He was quite charismatic and had a propensity for stealing coming up with glib phrases that others perceived as adding to his charm.

One of the things about which he consistently pontificated was, “the Moment of Truth”. That’s when a customer goes through an epiphany where he or she realizes the essential realities of a situation, like a product purchase. Looking back on it, it’s funny he brought it up so much, because the most common Moment of Truth for his customers was buyer’s remorse.

Not all Moments of Truth have to be bad ones, though. In fact, everyone who has a professional career has run into their fair share of them, many of which have good outcomes. What makes a Moment of Truth so terrifying is that it carries enough magnitude to be career-altering, if not—for better or worse—career-defining.

And so it is with the creative team here at SSCS. We’re facing our own Moment of Truth. As we told you last week, we’ve been spending most of our time on a completely redesigned website which, in SSCS tradition, we have built from the ground up, using in-house talent exclusively. This project goes into executive review Monday of next week.

Executive review is a funny thing. You walk into it thinking that you know what elements of a project may be called into question, bracing yourself for the rush of feedback, and then something you didn’t think would be called out becomes a discussion topic. It’s taught us that anticipating too much beforehand usually ends up being a waste of time and energy. You’re better off making your best effort with a healthy respect for your company’s culture, and then letting the chips fall where they may.

There have been any number of challenges to the new website, technical and creative, but perhaps the biggest one is using it to communicate what makes our company special, without relying on the tired old tropes of “better, faster, easier.” Everyone says that.

The gauntlet of executive review notwithstanding, it won’t be too long before you’ll be able to judge how well we’ve done. The creative team is pretty relaxed right now, and we don’t think it’s the calm before the storm or naiveté or myopia or any other negative contextualization. We’re excited about what we’ve done so far and we’re expecting much of that enthusiasm to be contagious, both inside and outside of SSCS.

We’ll keep you posted on our progress. In the meantime, we’ve included a few more image concepts throughout this post for your perusal.