The most memorable project I ever worked on wasn't a website

While I was at Engage Interactive, someone had the idea that we should brew our own charity beer, in collaboration with Revolutions craft brewery. Note the shape of that sentence: someone had the idea. No client asked for it. No brief existed. There was no line in anyone's budget with "beer" written next to it. It happened because a digital agency full of people who made websites for a living decided, collectively, that this was obviously something we should do.

We even went down to the brewery to help add the hops ourselves. There's a photo of my colleagues doing exactly that, and what I love about it is how seriously everyone is taking it. A room full of designers and developers handling hops with the focus of people defusing something. We were not needed for this step. The brewery had it covered. We went anyway.

The label, and why I'm still smug about it

I designed the label. We ran a low-key internal design competition for it, which is more than half the reason I'm so proud of the result. Winning a design brief when the entire jury and competitor pool is made up of professional designers you sit next to every day is a very specific kind of satisfying. Nobody was being polite. Everyone wanted it.

The design brought Engage's brand together with an icon for each person on the team. Mine was a football, because I'm from Newcastle, and apparently that was the most defining thing about me at the time. A character summary I've decided not to appeal.

We called it #Beer, because we were a digital agency in 2016 and that felt extremely on brand. We put a QR code on the bottle, back when QR codes were still considered somewhat ironic at best. In our defence, we were early. In everyone else's defence, so was the QR code.

We sold the lot

This is the bit that still surprises me. With 750 bottles and a few casks filled, #Beer went on sale in Leeds city centre bars and cafes, with all proceeds going to the Yorkshire Air Ambulance.

Actual strangers, in actual bars, handed over actual money for a thing our team had made with our hands, and an air ambulance charity got the proceeds. I have shipped websites worth hundreds of thousands of pounds since then, for household-name clients, with launch plans and stakeholder maps and everything done properly. And when someone asks what I'm most proud of from my agency years, the beer is still the first thing I mention. Every time. The websites have to wait their turn.

Why the beer beats the websites

I've thought about why, because on paper it makes no sense. The answer, I think, comes down to three things the beer had that almost nothing else in my working life has had.

It didn't have to exist. Nobody asked us to do it, it served no client, and it moved no number anyone was measured on. Which means everyone involved was a volunteer rather than an assignee, and volunteers bring a completely different energy to work. You cannot buy the way people behave on a project they chose. I've watched teams drag themselves through funded, mandated, strategically vital projects, and I've watched the same people give up evenings for something pointless. The difference isn't professionalism. It's ownership, the real kind, the kind that only turns up when it was optional.

It required skills we weren't hired for. Nobody at a digital agency has "brewing" on their CV, and it turns out that's the appeal. Doing something adjacent to your craft but outside it, label design counts, hop-adding ceremonially counts, reminds a team that they're a group of capable people rather than a set of job titles. The best team culture I've experienced wasn't built in workshops. It was built doing slightly daft things properly.

And it produced something you could hold in your hand. This is the one that's grown on me most over the years. Most of what we make in digital closes when you close the browser tab. Sites get redesigned, apps get sunset, entire platforms disappear and take a decade of everyone's work politely with them. The beer got drunk, which is arguably a faster form of disappearing, but a bottle sat on shelves, in fridges, in hands. For a while, our work had a physical address. People who spend their whole careers making intangible things will understand exactly why that mattered more than it should.

Make the thing nobody asked for

I'm not going to end this with "and that's why every company should brew a beer", because it isn't the beer. It's what the beer was: an unbriefed, unfunded, collectively chosen project that gave a team a reason to be a team, and produced something real at the end of it. Yours might be a zine, a game jam, a ridiculous internal tool, a charity single your colleagues will pretend not to remember.

Ours also came with an interactive bottle webpage, because we were who we were and couldn't help ourselves. But the webpage is long gone, and the memory of standing in a brewery taking hops far too seriously is not, which rather proves the point. Some of the best project management advice I can give has nothing to do with managing projects: every so often, make something nobody asked for. Sell the lot.