Scale with purpose

We are frequently asked to provide UX designers & front-end developers to augment our customers’ product teams. This is often to ramp up their capacity to meet a market demand or to provide expertise for a specific project. In all cases, our staff are seconded to our clients and become embedded on the product team they are working with. Before March 2020, a lot of this work took place remotely across geographically dispersed teams. This made the transition to a fully remote workforce at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic a relatively seamless process.

Design agencies can only thrive when they’ve mastered the flexibility challenges of staff resourcing, ensuring that they have capacity when opportunities arise and are able to embrace the fluctuations in client demand as a necessary part of the working model.

We have been partnering on this flexible basis for many years with several large enterprises and have enhanced our resourcing model year-on-year.

We thought we’d share some of the factors that have allowed this to flourish.

These types of engagements work best when we go beyond providing consultants to simply deliver assets and then step back. Delivering solutions that drive the product development forward is of course a key objective but real success comes from creating a partnership.

We learn about your business processes and gain a deep understanding of your business model, customer segments and product roadmap This knowledge has a positive impact on the solutions that we develop and ensures we are not working in a vacuum. We regard this as a critical part of our onboarding.

In turn, we would expect your team to benefit from our knowledge and experience and gain the insights of a third-party agency. 

This “perspective’ might be a different way of doing something, a new technique that you hadn’t seen before or an approach to project governance that helps in the future. 

Our most successful partnerships have been underpinned by this two-way knowledge transfer and we see this as a central plank of helping our clients to scale effectively.

All our clients have different cultures and ways of working and we always try to adapt to each one to contribute fully. 

Having said that, when we think we can improve an existing practice, we call it out and support our client in making the shift. 

This might involve a different approach to team communications using tools like Slack or MS Teams, suggestions on how the UX Design and DevOps processes can function effectively in an Agile environment or guidance and support in running effective remote workshops.

All work is supervised and overseen by a Senior Director.  This oversight goes beyond basic compliance checks to ensure that the work is being completed. Instead, all our consultants benefit from having access to a Director to use as a sounding board for ideas and creative design. 

One of our key strengths is that this internal collaboration is a default part of our enterprise engagements. Each enterprise client that we take on will have a dedicated Senior Director assigned in a background supporting role, providing industry leading support to staff on the ground.

The nature of our agency model is that our employees are involved in a mix of projects either over time or at any one time. For example, some staff are committed for a fixed number of days per week with a client and have availability on other days, some may move from project to project on a full-time basis and others may be engaged on a number of smaller projects at any one time. 

This fluid scheduling model has the benefit of keeping our staff very nimble and accustomed to moving between clients at relatively short notice. They have developed techniques to onboard quickly and establish an effective working cadence in as short a time as possible.

This flexible resourcing model also works well for staff, providing great diversity in the commercial domains and product challenges that they face as they move from client to client. 

As mentioned above, each enterprise client that we take on has a dedicated Senior Director assigned in a background supporting role, providing industry leading support to staff on the ground. 

As well as enhancing the quality of our work, this ensures continuity across different resources and projects undertaken for the client. This senior team member acts as the common thread for the entire engagement. From experience, we have found that this improves our ability to be flexible when it comes to scaling and onboarding new staff into your team.

As we work with our clients over time, and the partnership builds, you can expect to see a more rapid deployment of additional resources when required. This stems from building good communication channels that allow us to understand your potential demand and build it into our resource planning strategy. 

In addition, the accumulated experience we build over time enhances the value of each additional resource. This is seen in faster onboarding and productivity gains from an understanding of the client’s work practices and corporate culture.