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PRODUCE

HAVE YOU

WORKED IT

OUT YET?How to unlock the formula for a

high performance digital product team

The Human Layer

JULY 2015 Brought to you by

SPECIAL ISSUE N°3

The Human Layer

JULY 2015 Brought to you by

SPECIAL ISSUE

Perspectives on building successful digital product capability

Featuring contributions from:John Barrow, Katie Buchanan, Matt Kelly, Mariana Southern,

Mark Wilson and Simon Young

Issue #3

Previous topics we’ve explored in The Human Layer have been inspired by our

personal experiences, changing behaviours and rapidly digitising sectors that

have excited us. This time, our topic is slightly different. This issue is a direct

response to a plea that many of our clients have asked of us recently: make

our digital teams better.

This has been most noticeable in the briefs that have been landing in our

inboxes over the last six months. Beyond the delivery of excellent digital

experiences that we’ve always been asked to help organisations with,

almost all have asked for ‘upskilling’ in some capacity. This has always been –

we hope – a byproduct of working with an agency that values collaboration

as highly as we do at Wilson Fletcher, but upskilling as a deliverable has

been a relatively new request in 2015.

While the cynics in us might point to upskilling as this year’s disruption/

transformation/[insert generic industry buzzword here], improving digital

capability is something we help our clients with every single day. And certainly,

the pressure on established organisations to bring world-class digital services

to market at pace has never been greater. Determining the best approach to

digital product development is a critical challenge faced by every organisation

today, as is the need to sustain that capability.

What follows in this newspaper is a selection of articles and personal

experiences of people trying to crack what makes for great digital product

development teams. For some of our contributors, improving digital capability

means choosing the right agency to work with them in the right way. For

others, it’s about understanding what you’re good at and being unafraid of

sticking to it. And for some, building great digital capability means instilling

agency thinking in -house.

While there are certainly several guiding lessons to take away, there is no

single answer, simply because no two organisations have the same makeup,

demands and objectives. So think of this newspaper as a workbook, a series

of lessons and exercises that will help you determine what’s best for you.

We hope it will help you crack your own formula.

Editor’s letter

Sorcha Daly is the Editor of

The Human Layer and Senior

Content Strategist at Wilson Fletcher

Responsive Design: It’s not just for websites

How to keep your team responsive in an agile world.

The digital landscape alters industry. At Associated Press, we live it daily as the news

industry attempts to embrace its traditional roots yet discover new, useful ways to

stay relevant in a socially connected world. This is exciting and frightening. Any

industry that is trying to fi nd or rediscover its footing is imposing.

Moreover, it’s daunting to contrive and maintain support capabilities in a shifting

organisation. Even defi ning what “success” means to your organisation might be

dizzying. Be adaptive. Understanding your organisation, not merely products but

enterprise -level goals, affords appreciation across the array of customer touch

points. An effi cient strategy to deliver digital products must regard the top down

to adequately guide the ship.

There are numerous methodologies available but you’ll likely come into yours

through trial and error. You may instinctually want to adopt one verbatim. Stay

mindful. Identical company cultures are non existent, so a one- size -fi ts- all approach

is more or less fi ctitious. Chances are you will mature your processes over time.

The goal is to stay as process- lean as possible at every turn.

As the Director of Product Design at AP, adaptability for me is administering an

annual mission statement with simple, understandable and achievable objectives.

Defi ning a mission that’s actionable is critical. It remains fl uid and serves as both a

reminder of our legacy and of how we’ll adapt in the coming months. Furthermore,

it outlays a unifi ed commitment while staying agile. As the team embraces the

mission, they can up skill accordingly by learning new technologies or tools.

Educate your organisation on your processes and learn how to “sell” your story.

Illustrate your vision in a measurable pilot if necessary by recruiting an internal

business partner. We’ve spent more than two years instilling UX into the AP

lexicon by proving how knowledge of who our customers are and how they behave

empowers intelligent decisions. Including cross-departmental representatives

helped make the case and produced an army of advocates.

Our Product Design team is lean and small, with a long reach, overlapping skills

and “intrapreneurial” spirits. We’re an in -house “agency” that services one

By John Barrow, Director of

Product Design, Associated Press

Be adaptiveDon’t adopt methodologies just

because they work for others.

Instead, commit to trial and error

until you fi nd yours.

Identical company cultures are non-existent, so a one-size-fi ts-all approach is more or less fi ctitious.

Be unifi edSet and share regular mission

statements as targets for what

success means right now,keeping it

transparent as and when it changes.

client – the AP. The team is diverse with synchronistic personalities and there

is a high level of autonomy along with a culture of peer review. They remain

informed across the product landscape and have the opportunity for involvement

on projects to which they have not been directly assigned. A creative environment

fosters electric collaboration, debate and innovation. We’ve created a work area

that is conducive to creativity. The space is as tactile a space as possible, with

an oversized whiteboard, common area, putting green and various games for

stimulation. In an offi ce of cubicles, we’ve removed the glass partitions to encourage

organic interaction amongst the team. In light of the space, stakeholders from

other departments stop by regularly, a practice that opens up cross -departmental

communication.

As to the question of outsourcing, we’ve experienced varying degrees of success at

AP. There are certainly situations where it’s a smart choice – we fully outsource all

QA for advanced automation, for example. However, jumping from vendor to vendor

is challenging. There are realities such as time zones and language barriers, but

imagine educating a new vendor for each project. Timelines and budgets can quickly

get away, erasing any saving that was a lure to begin with. Cost savings ought not be

your only factor in making an outsource decision and you should think of partners

rather than suppliers.

We often claim to know our own customers and organisations best, but it’s a

problematic assumption since we naturally have bias. Engaging with the right

partner often broadens the view without the bias and can help inform product

roadmaps. Allow unfettered, sometimes unfl attering insight of your business that

is frequently diffi cult to obtain from within. Non biased input derived from research

is paramount and, in some cases, priceless. As you work with a partner long enough,

you become in lockstep and able to instinctually know where they fi t into a project,

even during planning stages.

It is important to think of partners as extensions of your team from the onset. Longer

term relationships prove best. Ultimately, what you want is for your partner to become

subject matter experts, just as you have, as well as being versed in your corporate

ways. Embed into your partner – or vice versa – to act as a liaison. Claim a workspace

at your partner’s studio and have someone from your team sit there regularly to allow

more agility. Direct access to stakeholders can be a dramatic time saver.

We design websites responsively and optimise the user experience across a

multitude of footprints, so start taking the same approach to designing your teams.

If you stay in tune, remain responsive and agile in your approach and provide an

environment that is creative, collaborative and engaging, you will be more apt to

survive the tide in delivering world- class digital products.

Create a space for collaborationSmall changes to environment –

like taking down desk partitions

– can encourage creativity and

collaboration.

Sell your storyRecruit an internal business partner

and cross -department advocates to

build support for your projects across

the organisation – and keep sharing

your story.

Embed partners in your teamChoose a partner for a long term

relationships to garner unfettered,

unbiased insight of your business that

can inform the product roadmap.

It is important to think of partners as extensions of your team from the onset.

Along with its sibling disruption, innovation is surely one of the defining words of

our age. The principles encased in it have been important to everyone who was

sitting back and ignoring how the dynamics of business were changing. Most long -

-established businesses had become ponderous and their cosy market positions

were suddenly being disrupted by lean, fail- fast teenage upstarts with startups. To

survive, let alone compete, they needed to become more innovative.

However, somehow, somewhere along the line, the imperative to be more innovative

got bastardised into ‘act like a startup’ and everyone got swept up in it. Many digital

agencies and consulting firms adopted it as their mantra and packaged up startup -

like methodologies as processes they could sell in.

They’ve been giving out design thinking toolkits and innovation frameworks, taken

the Board to a disruptive business techniques workshop and got the CEO wearing

jeans. Organisations have been convinced that by using these tools, by following

specific methods and following frameworks, they too can behave just like those

Silicon Valley rocketships that go from idea to island ownership in months.

The reality is, however, a little more complicated. Startups (typically technology-

centred new businesses) are themselves a product of innovation. They are

fundamentally organisations set up to make an idea happen, often driven by a single

person’s vision about a single thing, a big pot of money and no risk other than failure

(and most do fail: something like one in 20 startups succeed, with one in 1000 making

it big – hardly success rates to aspire to). Oh, and they’re usually staffed by young

teams who know they can just hop onto the next startup if this one doesn’t make it.

Established organisations are very different animals and have a lot more at stake,

which means that they can’t just start acting like startups. What they can – and

must – do is adopt new practices and shift their behaviour. The ‘act more like a

startup’ imperative is the wrong emphasis, and not least because the good startups

don’t stay startups for long.

What happens to startups if they become successful? They become secure and

self-sustaining, they expand and grow, they become ‘real’ businesses, sometimes

employing thousands of people on hundreds of floors in office buildings in multiple

countries. Bit by bit, they stop behaving like the ‘startups’ they were and start

behaving like mature digital -age businesses.

The really interesting, great role models for businesses aren’t startups, they’re

these ex- startups. They quickly shed many of their most startup- like behaviours,

adapt some new behaviours for their increasingly established businesses, maintain

a few key principles and philosophies and add an increasing dose of rigour to their

thinking. Combined, this allows them to evolve and adapt their offer better and

faster than many traditional peers.

Stop trying to act like startups

Evolve and adapt: that’s the crux of the challenge for an established organisation.

By Mark Wilson, Managing

Director of Wilson Fletcher

The real role models for established businesses are ex-startups.

Evolve and adapt: that’s the crux of the challenge for an

established organisation. Successful innovation for an

established business is rarely about developing radically new

ideas; it’s about building on your strengths. In a recent interview,

Lego’s CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, summed up their internal

innovation approach nicely: “It’s about discovering what’s

obviously Lego but has never been seen before.” It’s worth noting

that he said this shortly after Lego became the world’s biggest

toy manufacturer.

This goes some way to explaining why few well- known ex -

-startups have gone on to subsequent success with dramatically

new offerings, because radical innovation or startup -like shifts

in direction (ok, I’ll say it, pivots) became increasingly risky and

commercially inappropriate as they became successful. The

more customers they had, the more revenue they generated, and

the more mouths they had to feed, the more they had to lose –

just like those old -school peers.

Of course, the smart ones recognise this and accept it as part of

becoming a ‘real’ business, typically using their cash mountains

to acquire new products and services to offer their customers

instead. Today’s Mark Zuckerberg is the smart CEO of an ex-

startup: a big business, with some powerhouse lieutenants, that

does what it needs to in order to deliver continued success. The

new Facebook for Business can hardly be described as a startup-

like innovation – it’s an evolutionary step, and many would say a

defensive one at that. If there’s one thing startups should never

be, it’s defensive.

So the question is: if successful startups don’t maintain their

own behaviour as they become established and successful,

why is anyone trying to encourage established business to

behave like them? Why try to take a business with solid market

foundations and make it more like one without? Clearly,

we shouldn’t. Many established organisations are simply

incompatible with startup behaviour.

You can’t simply introduce innovation to established

organisations like it’s a new HR system. The real message in

the innovation agenda is ‘you need to listen to your customers

constantly, pay close attention to what is going on around you,

proactively look for new opportunities and rapidly adapt your

business to explore and exploit them’.

You can’t simply introduce innovation to established

organisations like it’s a new HR system. You can’t install an

internal innovation team and expect them to make your entire

organisation innovative, nor can you graft something onto the

edges and hope for a halo effect. This behaviour needs to be

learned and adopted, built on smaller steps and the progressive

confidence that comes from forward momentum.

It’s time to own up here. I found myself reviewing a plan

for a long standing client the other day: a plan, ready to be

implemented in the next few months, for setting them up

a standalone innovation lab. This innovation lab would be

separated from the pressures and innate behaviours of their core

business, help them generate a steady stream of new product

ideas and give them a sustainable engine for innovation.

I realised that we were actually proposing something that

sounded great, but that I simply didn’t believe would work. We

were planning to help them run faster by growing them a new

arm. What they need is a fitter heart and stronger legs.

The reality is that we can, and will, help them become a more

successful digital -age business, but we won’t do it by trying to

make them into something they’re not. They are never, ever, going

to behave like a startup. Instead, we’ll focus on helping them

become a much better version of what they are: an established,

successful business with long-standing customers and healthy

profits that most startups would kill to have. We’ll help them

rethink what they need to, evolve where they should, and

introduce new services where there are compelling opportunities

to do so; but we’ll do it centrally, and we’ll do it carefully.

This is a business that’s decades old. It will take them time to

learn new habits. They’ll absorb new techniques and practices

rather than have them imposed. They’ll adapt positively and

progressively and they’ll do it without breaking their existing

business, something startups never have to consider. Startups have

nothing to break, established organisations do. Ex -startups do too.

We’re only just seeing the first generation of ex -startups operate

in the broader business context, and time will tell how well they

maintain the competitive edge. Based on what we’ve seen so

far, I believe that they provide a much better role model for how

established organisations should behave than startups ever will.

You can’t simply introduce innovation to established organisations like it’s a new HR system.

By Mariana Southern,

Head of Innovation at William Hill

Muddling through

When asked to write an article on building and running a digital team I

couldn’t help but wonder whether I was the right person to do this. I have

neither the credentials, nor the formal qualifications, nor any published

works on this subject. My professional background is in User Experience

and in previous lives I was a Food Engineer and a Cognitive Psychology PhD

student. But building and running William Hill’s Shoreditch Innovation

team is what I’ve been trying to do for the last year or so, so all that is

written here is from hands‐on experience.

Most people who are put in charge of building something new and

worthwhile probably feel like I do most days: blindfolded, feeling their way

around, arms stretched out forward in hesitation. To add to that teetering

feeling, good decisions are usually discovered in hindsight. My way of

getting through it is sticking to three guiding principles: 1) build nothing

that doesn’t add value to the customer or more importantly, make their

lives better in some way; 2) look after people over throughput, profit or any

personal agenda and 3) question everything – how you work, what has been

done so far, how it’s been done, what tools have been used, job roles and

titles, team structures and so on.

Besides these core principles, my main working tools are gut feel and

empathy. Believe it or not, empathy is an extremely effective, hard

business tool. People respond to empathy. Using it both when considering

my customers and my team drives motivation and eventually leads to

remarkable digital experiences (which, in essence, are built by people to be

used by people).

One other constant in the context of digital and innovation is change.

A tautology, I know, but an important one to keep in mind. Customer

behaviours have changed dramatically and so have (or should have) long‐

standing disciplines such as UX, design and project management, to name

a few. In the day‐to‐day you have to go with what works for the team and

let them choose how they work, what tools they use and create selfless

T‐shaped roles. In our team, besides their main job, everyone does a little

of everything. We have lost many of the two‐letter roles you can usually

find in ‘traditional’ digital teams like the BA, PM, SE, PO and are continually

questioning the roles we still hold, including my own.

Also important is ownership. Everyone owns the product and everyone is

present in all the meetings, demos or stand‐ups. We don’t have separate

A personal account of running a digital innovation team.

Build nothing that doesn’t add value to the customer.

Question everything – how you work, what has been done so far and team structure.

Look after people over throughput, profit or any personal agenda.

‘business’, ‘product’ or ‘tech’ meetings, and we are constantly revising what our meetings are

for. We have retrospectives at the end of each release, where we self‐evaluate and adjust what

went wrong.

In order to innovate and change we had to become autonomous, both in terms of process and

technology. The more you integrate innovation into the main business, the slower it gets. And

ultimately, William Hill will fail to innovate, and so will we as a team. So as the innovation team,

we have to operate independently from the organisation. A good example is when we found

that using current release processes and technical infrastructure was too cumbersome for us to

be lean, so we built our own platform for release.

This independence from the organisation is both our biggest luxury and our biggest challenge,

as we come up against the vacuum between the way we work and the way the rest of the

company does alongside trying to integrate what we do into the existing product, structure and

tech. William Hill is a large 80‐year‐old organisation that has learned to do something really

well and naturally opposes the forces that are trying to do something differently. We often don’t

have the roles and documentation that is ‘expected’ as standard and our work can be perceived

as less serious than the rest of the company’s. Besides, everyone is busy with their own

roadmaps and often see us as an unwanted distraction. Because of this, I spend much of my

time insulating the team from politics, working hard at our internal PR, promoting transparency

and building relationships. One such way is to invite people from other teams to our demos to

see what we are doing and ask them to raise ideas or issues.

Perhaps this way of working can only operate in smaller teams within the context of smaller

builds. But if we know it works – and so far I don’t have reason to believe it doesn’t – maybe we

should only create small teams that work in small builds, even in big businesses.

We are learning to work better as a digital innovation team, but a lot needs to be done in the

wider context of the business and how it commits to innovation. As you get the within‐team

answers, the challenge is likely to be the between‐teams dynamic. And the between‐teams

dynamic often fails for the reasons I mentioned earlier. I believe that a clear umbrella culture of

selfless collaboration across all teams should be the starting point to address a lot of the issues.

And if you read closely, culture has been the constant thread in this article.

When it comes down to it, it is the culture you instill, the values you hold, communicate

and transfer to everyone in the team that will eventually underlie the value you add to the

customer. And hiring people who value that same ethos is equally important. They need to fit

culturally and they need to be nice. They need to be selfless, relentless and believe anything

is possible. They need to be comfortable with risk and uncertainty. They need to be OK with

throwing away the rule book.

They say culture eats strategy for breakfast... I say culture eats everything for breakfast. It

eats strategy, process, hierarchy, roles, rules and reward systems. And culture too, needs to

keep changing.

The more you integrate innovation into the main business, the slower it gets.

What the newspaper industry can teach digital about product, publishing and perseverance.

On babies and bathwater

It is, and has been for a decade or more, fashionable to patronise the

newspaper industry. A friend of mine, a barrister, tells a great story about

a judge explaining a piece of jurisprudence to a not‐very‐bright defendant,

and then pausing to say: “I don’t mean to patronise you... you do know

what patronise means, don’t you?”

That’s how it feels sometimes when you confess to being from the world

of print. For the past ten years my sole focus has been the development

and growth of mass market digital media within legacy businesses; first

with the Daily Mirror in the UK, then with a number of Latin American

news organisations – especially Argentina’s Grupo Clarin – and now with

Local World, a major group of more than 70 news brands in the UK.

Colleagues from the tech community, digital, entrepreneurs and even other

legacy media (TV in particular – and don’t worry my friends; your time is

coming) look upon those of us from and in the newspaper trade with a degree

of semi‐interested curiosity. The way we gaze at white rhinos in a safari park.

Sometimes, out of politeness, they ask a few questions. But never the right

questions. “Where do all the stories come from?” (newspapers have things

called reporters who are paid to find and write them) “Is it true they’ve got

a safe at The Sun with pictures of so and so doing something unspeakable

with an Alsatian?” (so I hear) and “Is Piers Morgan really such an arse?”

(no, he’s an extraordinarily decent and funny guy).

Some of the questions they should be asking – you know, just on the off

chance they could actually learn something from the tree‐killers – include

the following:

What are the production processes that enable you to create an entire newspaper from scratch, every day, without fail?

Like the world of digital development, newspapers also employ an agile

process. Except in the case of newspapers, this agile process is actually

By Matt Kelly, Director of Local

World and former Publisher of

Mirror Group Digital

agile. The production and distribution of a mass market national

newspaper is a science that has been perfected over generations

and is founded on the principle of close collaboration between

groups with clearly demarcated responsibilities all working

towards a common goal – the deadline.

Intrinsic in this process is a high tolerance of errors. Kelvin

McKenzie, a well-known former tabloid editor (and, interestingly

enough, a very successful digital entrepreneur these days) once

told me that any day he got 7 out of 1o editorial decisions right

was a great day. Getting everything right in a daily newspaper is

not the point. Getting the newspaper to the point of sale on time

is the point.

How do you iterate your product so the newspaper in your hands can feel both modern and yet recognisably the same product your father brought home with him in the 1970s?

Newspapers evolve constantly. Change is structuralised into

the workflow. The very production of a newspaper is designed

to accommodate day-to-day iterative improvements which will

deliver a commercial advantage but won’t scare the readers. And

they are brilliant at it. Over time, the product evolves piecemeal,

never seeking or desiring a state of stasis. Silicon Valley thinks

they invented the concept of permanent beta. They didn’t; they

just gave it a name.

How have you managed to maintain a business for decades that consistently manages millions of micro‐transactions on a daily basis?

Every single day, millions of people walk into a newsagent

or supermarket and pick up a newspaper WITHOUT EVEN

THINKING ABOUT IT! Name me an app that would survive

a month if you had to go to a shop to manually renew the

subscription. Even a week?

Newspapers are brilliant at creating loyalty because they are

dependable – managing to combine both predictability and

surprise. “Shock and amaze on every page” used to be the mantra

for tabloids in the UK in the 70s. And they did. But they did so

within a consistent framework allied to consistent values.

Steve Jobs liked to bang on about understanding the ‘why’ of

Apple’s products. Newspapers know their ‘why’ inside out –

sometimes they know it so well they can’t even articulate it,

but just feel it instead – and when they breach those values

(and I watched 5% of loyal Daily Mirror readers walk away for

good when we printed hoax photographs from the Gulf War) the

readership feel a sense of outrage that can only be felt about

something you care about deeply. Tell me an app that people

care about that much. How do they achieve this? Newspapers

are built in their readers’ image. Not the other way round.

How did the newspaper industry manage to adapt and thrive throughout wave after wave of cyclical and structural existential threat?

Radio, TV, teletext, the internet – they were all supposed to kill

newspapers. And yet... (well, ok, perhaps the internet will finally

see them off – but not any time soon) they survive. Not through

pivots, but through perseverance.

The skills that make the daily miracle of newspaper creation a

reality are just as valuable in the creation of digital products. It’s

just that the digital community doesn’t always appreciate that.

Nor, sadly, does the newspaper business itself.

The skills that make the daily miracle of newspaper creation a reality are just as valuable in the creation of digital products.

But what about when a company decides it’s time to make the transition

from being the client to also doing the work traditionally done by the

agency? How do you go about recruiting an internal digital product team

with very specific technical skills from scratch? And how do you integrate

that team into an existing business?

This was the challenge I took on two years ago, when I moved from agency-

side to set up Paul Smith’s web development team. The following is my

advice for anybody embarking on the same challenge.

Set your roadmap collectively Without doubt the biggest benefit of bringing your digital product

development team in-house is the additional control it gives you over your

own development roadmap. Your team is working solely on your projects

and your priorities and isn’t open to external impacts such as the demand of

other agency clients. Limitations will still apply but these tend not to be the

hard financial limits that often constrain an external development roadmap

and tend to be more about prioritising your internal team’s resources.

As we brought our team in- house we put in place a steering group

comprised of key members of the e-commerce, IT and marketing teams.

This group has a remit to agree and prioritise the development roadmap,

taking into account trading requirements, brand marketing requirements

and available resources across teams. This collective digital management

enables us to react quickly when opportunities present themselves

By Simon Young, Web

Development Manager at

Paul Smith

Lessons in building an in-house web delivery team

The first person I ever worked for offered me these words of wisdom on my very first day: “In the end, every client leaves. Some after a year, some after ten years but eventually they all leave.”

and also to respond to changes or new priorities within the

business with minimum disruption. This process and collective

responsibility is vital in order to set realistic expectations for

other business stakeholders.

Know what not to bring in-house Perhaps the most important element of bringing your team in-

house is understanding what not to bring in-house. We brought

all of our digital development in-house and, based on our existing

strong IT function and the people we were able to attract, we also

took the step of bring our e -commerce platform hosting in-house

too. This was not a simple task and took a major investment in

hardware and support software services but it was a good fit for

our overall IT strategy and has enabled us to lower our ongoing

operating expenditure in this area. At the same, we also recognised

a set of services that were so specialist that it would make no

financial sense to bring them in- house, so we still use external

partners for some very specific areas of our service offering.

Build from the top We took the approach that the best way to build the team

was top -down. By starting off with myself and adding a digital

project manager, we were able to get our strategy in place to

continue working with our partner agency as we recruited the

internal team and brought them up to speed. Working with an

agency who understood that this was our desired end result was

extremely important.

Work like an agency When we started the journey to bring our digital product team

in -house, we were faced with a set of practices and processes

that were focused on delivering internal IT services over a specific

platform which did not fit with the open source nature of our

digital products. Early on, we took the decision that we would

invest in new tools for the business to best replicate the processes

that had worked so well in an agency/client relationship.

For us, this meant investing in introducing the agile development

methodology internally, which hadn’t been done before. We

invested in agile training, supporting software and services and

ensured complete transparency across the team, the IT group

and the wider business. We then focused on building our ability

to deliver – starting with fairly small sprint sizes and proving to

the business every two weeks that we could deliver this service

internally. That agile development and delivery methodology was

key to allowing other areas of the business to have confidence in

the digital product team.

Establish clear business expectations Working with an agency usually comes with fairly high

expectations. You’re usually making a heavy financial

investment in the relationship, which means that when things go

wrong you expect them to be fixed and you don’t have to bother

yourself with considering how. Essentially, you are hiring them to

take problems away.

Once you move past that agency model it’s vital to ensure that

the business has a clear understanding of the levels of service

and support that can be offered. To aid with this we use an

internal Service Level Agreement to ensure that everybody

understands what to expect.

So, is it worth it? It may not be a route that is right for every company, but taking

account of the key points above has certainly helped us on the

way to the successful implementation of our technical delivery

in house. We’re now able to deliver continuous improvement

and innovation with a lower total cost base and a higher return

than ever before, while still maintaining the type of flexibility we

enjoyed working with a specialist technical agency.

Agile development and delivery is key to allowing other areas of the businessto have confidence in the digital product team.

Never in its history has design been so valued in business.

Traditional organisations of all types – from management

consultants to retailers and banks – are recognising the crucial

role that design plays and are either building or buying in design

skills at a rate of knots. At long last, everyone’s looking to build

the perfect design capability.

In the last six months, we’ve received numerous briefs asking

for help to ‘up skill’ in -house teams. These briefs all highlight

the same objectives and ask for the same deliverables, which

is remarkable given that they’re coming from vastly different

companies. As any former head of transformation or director

of disruption will tell you, we are a very trend- based industry.

When it comes to a team’s culture and processes, adopting the

latest buzz -approach and attempting to do what everyone else

is doing can be dangerous, as Gary Pisano highlights in a recent

Harvard Business Review article:

Innovation remains a frustrating pursuit. Failure rates are high and

even successful companies can’t sustain their performance. The root

cause is that companies fall into the trap of adopting whatever best

practices are in vogue or aping the exemplar innovation of the moment.

Gary P. Pisano, Harvard Business Review, June 2015

It should come as no surprise that there are multiple variations

of the in- house/out -house model in play: every organisation

is unique and has its own multitude of factors influencing

the dynamics of the digital team. An organisation’s shape,

history and digital maturity; the market and environment it

operates in; the individual personalities involved and the often

overwhelming impact of the organisational culture all affect

what will and won’t work.

But one ingredient that will always be essential in any

organisation is strong design leadership: a vocal champion for

the importance of the customer experience. The first step in

defining the right formula must be to hire experienced design

leaders who have the judgement to continually propose and

evaluate the shape and makeup of their digital team. These

people understand where the team’s skillset is strong, where it

needs to improve and, sometimes more importantly, where it

doesn’t. These leaders can judge what they should be doing in-

house, as well as understanding if, when and how they should

engage with external partners.

Design leaders understand the different capabilities that in- house

teams and external design partners have and what they can offer

the design process. Let’s not forget, the underlying characteristics

of each are inherently different. An in- house team is embedded in

the organisation, whether that be a bank, retailer or broadcaster,

and this means they are focused on their own business, typically

comparing themselves to their direct competitors. An external

partner, by contrast, typically works across multiple sectors, with

multiple types of organisation and can provide a broader and

more objective perspective.

Due to their embedded nature, internal teams can often get

caught up with the constant pressure to launch products, losing

the ability to pull back and frame a problem instead of jumping

in and trying to solve it. They are simply too close to the problem

and all the small details that impact it. External teams provide

fresh perspectives, broader influences and new thinking but are

rarely in touch enough with internal agendas to make the best

decisions for the business. In our experience, the best results

come from blending the advantages of both. We certainly always

do our best work alongside smart internal teams.

But let’s take a step back and remember who we are doing this for

– customers. And what do customers care about? It’s certainly not

the skillset of your internal team or even the process by which the

product they use was made. They just care that it’s great. Obviously,

from a business perspective, customers equal revenue, loyalty and

brand advocacy. You simply can’t afford to deprioritise their needs.

In today’s competitive market, organisations need to use

whatever methods and processes they can to ensure their

products are always world- class: customers simply won’t wait

around for them to upskill.

The digital leader: The one hire your business needs

As the champion of both the customer experience and digital roadmap, the secret to a successful team is a great leader.

By Katie Buchanan,

Partner at Wilson Fletcher

Five principles of collaboration

12 34

5

The secret of a great design agency/client working

relationship is collaboration. Collaboration doesn’t just

mean regular meetings. Undoubtedly, the best work

we do is when we have smart clients who know their

business inside- out and are comfortable taking the

same approach as we do to collaboration. We have a

few basic principles that underpin this approach. 1Learn by doingWe believe that people need to apply

their knowledge to real-world challenges

in order to really learn. You can know and

understand the best methods and tools

but if you can’t apply them intelligently,

it means nothing.

2One approach does not fi t all2One approach does not fi t all2Every design challenge differs and each requires often a 2Every design challenge differs and each requires often a 2slightly nuanced approach. We don’t believe in process, 2slightly nuanced approach. We don’t believe in process, 2but a tailored approach based on each particular 2but a tailored approach based on each particular 2challenge. One process certainly does not fi t all. 2challenge. One process certainly does not fi t all. 24Collaboration is not 4Collaboration is not 4design by committee4design by committee4

We believe that the key to effective

collaboration is involving the right people

at the right time. Not everyone needs to

be involved in every decision and the art

of effective teamwork is knowing the roles

and strengths of each individual. 5Tangible outcomes

5Tangible outcomes

5build momentum5build momentum5We believe that the best way to build 5We believe that the best way to build 5momentum and demonstrate value for a 5momentum and demonstrate value for a 5partnership programme is to build brilliant, 5partnership programme is to build brilliant, 5tangible things quickly. This in turn will 5tangible things quickly. This in turn will 5increase the confi dence of internal teams 5increase the confi dence of internal teams 5and increase visibility across the business.5and increase visibility across the business.53Pushing frameworks and 3Pushing frameworks and 3toolkits on design teams 3toolkits on design teams 3

rarely worksWe believe it’s almost impossible to embed a process

from the outside in. Organisations need to create

and continually iterate on their own process. Pushing

frameworks and toolkits on design teams rarely works.

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