As I’m going to Chicago to present our final Studio 2 presentation to a different set of folks at Motorola, I am done with Adaptive Path for the week. That means my first two weeks at AP are behind me.

So what have I been up to? Not too much. But I don’t say that as a complaint.

Being a small consulting company, AP works on a variety of projects with different time lines. Some projects have recently ended, others are now beginning. I seem to have caught them in the middle.

What’s great is they are very open with what’s in the works and how all the projects are going. Each week they meet as a company to talk about what’s going on. Transparency is the norm and very different from other places I have worked.

This week I started to get involved with a few projects. Mostly I sat in on meetings and observed. In fact, while I haven’t been doing any designing yet, I have been doing lots of observing. I find just being at AP educational. I can’t help but compare their practices with the startup I worked at in the late 90s and my own business.

Earlier in the week I sat in on a meeting with a new client that was particularly interesting. While I can’t say much about it, I appreciated the teams’ interaction with the client. I get the sense that AP is not about holding the client’s hand. They will tell it like it is, which I prefer to deferential layers of bullshit.

I also appreciate their client selection considerations. They definitely do not take on clients for the sake of making money. And anyone in the company can veto a client.

Some other more intern-y things to report are they set up a tour of Anchor Steam brewery later this month during the week in the middle of the day. And they’ve arranged a field trip to Google to meet the folks behind the Google Analytics redesign.

Also, I offered to share my Studio 2 team’s Motorola concept and I’m now tentatively scheduled to present during one of AP’s weekly brown bag lunches in a couple weeks.