I. Welcome back & follow up
Good Morning and thank you again for inviting me into your inbox. I write about insights and provocations on the evolving nature of digital design. You can always subscribe here.
Follow up:
🔎 Related to Designing leadership in difficult times
The NY Times had an article on keeping behaviour professional at work as we transition into remote working where individuals may end up with less empathy.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone patted themselves on their back, like: ‘Oh, look, productivity has not fallen. We’ve transitioned to digital. We’ve done things we were seeking to do — streamline processes, move things online, decentralize decision making.’ But they were forgetting about culture,”
🔎 Related to Content Moderation
The New Yorker had a nice article on Signal and Moxie Marlinspike while Platformer talked about Signals hands-off role to moderating content. Will abstention and privacy continue to fuel tribalism, radicalism, and a complete breakdown of empathy?
🔎 Related to Content Moderation
I gave a talk at Facebook several weeks ago on the topic of content moderation. It’s nice to see the Oversight Board share similar critique on a path forward.
“In several cases, Members questioned whether Facebook’s rules were clear enough for users to understand.”
If you need an Oversight Board, it’s probably a sign your current guidelines aren’t clear enough.
Plenty above to think about, but for now, onto the weekly topic.
II. How we determine studio growth
Comfort is the enemy of growth 💡
We recently had to submit our FY22 (Fiscal Year 2022) plan to our main studio offices. This encompasses estimates and projections on our revenue, margins, and hiring plan. We use both historic data and our studio vision to create this plan. The downstream result of this eventually looks like “We need to hire a new Visual Designer”.
The series of events that lead to this plan through the actual execution are rarely seen by the rest of the studio team or organisation. For today, I wanted to pull back to curtain, and share a summarised view of how we strategically plan for growth.
📈 First, identify why you want to grow?
It’s best to start with this classic quote from hockey player Wayne Gretzky “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been”. To form a cohesive plan, look at where you need to be in 1-3 years. This could be in terms of team size, market position, or in our case, revenue contribution. If you focus on the future, you will be able to effectively push the present forward.
Usually studios grow for one of these two reasons - Are you growing to build revenue? Or offer new services?
As an example of our ‘Why’, starting in 2017-2018, for the Amsterdam Studio, we wanted to offer new services as a way to build revenue. We wanted to start focusing much more on Strategy and how our design work had a business impact. I wrote this summary to the studio at the start of 2021 as a reminder of our ambitions.
Coming from a foundation of screen based design, over the last 3 years, Amsterdam has consistently driven to grow both Research and Strategy. Within Europe, UI work was being priced steadily downward and becoming a commodity market where price was the only differentiation. We needed a way to differentiate, keep stable rates, and engage our studio.
Due to this, our goal was to work up the funnel and get involved at the early stages of product work, hopefully starting at Research. We wanted to deliver tangible business value through design. In this way, we could start early and extend through delivery.
🧭 Second, determine what you need to grow?
Once you know why you want to grow, you can identify what needs to happen to accomplish that. Do you need to build internal skills? Hire external skills? Or extend reach by hiring similar talent to what you may have?
To think of it in a simple way, if what you need isn’t much different than what you have, you can hire similar talent and build the skills internally through an education or training initiative. We did this with Research by sending individuals to training classes (with Studio D) and taking on small research programs to hone our skills.
If the skills you’re trying to build are very different from the current skills you possess, you will need to hire. This is what we did to build out our strategy discipline, hiring a Strategy Leader, pictured below talking to clients, to strengthen our offerings and assist the company with defining how we think of Strategy across the entire Experience process. She is now one of the most requested individuals on programs across the company, and we’re looking to hire additional Strategists for additional support.
🧨 Third, light a fire and start moving!
Once you know why you’re growing, and what you need to accomplish that, it becomes an operational exercise - putting words into action. If you’re hiring, set up a hiring plan. If you’re building skills internally, actively plan training and education - bring in trainers if needed. If you’re extending your services, look at how you adapt your messaging to clients to present your studio in the right framing.
In our case for FY22, our growth is specifically based on an increased revenue expectation (this is our Why). We know in order to accomplish this we need to hire additional team members as we can’t raise rates. In looking at our studio skills and client needs, we know those new hires will need to focus on Strategy, Program Management, and Visual Design skills (this is our What).
We now have a plan which sets hiring targets during certain months, which lets us plan the year effectively.
🔮 What else you might want to ask
There is a never ending list of questions I could write, but these three felt most critical for small companies, teams, or organisations focused on growth.
For introducing a new service, how do you compare to competitors?
For introducing a new service, are you stretching your company too thin trying to do too many things?
For a new service, do you have the network to sell it, and is there demand for it?
That’s all for this week! See everyone next Monday 📅
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