Who do you want to work with?
After reviewing our credentials and our approach, a client asked me for a proposal for an upcoming project. They wanted to understand the needs of their users and design a low-fidelity prototype (or wireframes) that would satisfy those needs. While I prepared the proposal, the client approached three software development shops who were capable of building the new application. Each of these shops claimed to have the capability to do the whole project; they recommended that the client eliminate Hostile Sheep from consideration because it would be easier and more cost efficient to use one shop for the whole thing.
When the client refused to summarily eliminate us from consideration, one shop told our client that Hostile Sheep could conduct the user research but they needed to do the experience design themselves. We have a very open and very close relationship with our clients; our client forwarded us their email, which stated:
We appreciate that [Hostile Sheep] is an expert at jobs-to-be-done user research but we have an internal process that needs to be adhered to. We don’t know whether their UX deliverables will include the information we’d need/want. We would likely have to redo their work (duplicating efforts and costs). I recommend keeping them on the user research and making the UX part of our scope of work.
I was shocked at first. If we were doing the customer interviews, surely they could understand that we’d be in the best position to translate our findings to experience design guidelines. Anything the dev shop needed, we could include in our deliverables. At first I was confused; why would the dev shop call out how rigid their process is? They couldn’t pick-up our work and run with it? Doesn’t that make them look like a poor team player? If they can’t work with our experience design guidelines, will they be able to work with our research findings?
Option 1: The greedy vendor
After our client decided to award us with the customer research and award the rest of the project to the dev shop, I had the opportunity to sit down with their team during the kick-off meeting. Their new business guru was at the meeting and the confusion I initially felt melted away. They weren’t worried about what was best for the project, they wanted as much of the budget as they could get. When we left the meeting, the new business guru took me aside and said:
I hope there’s no hard feelings about the UX. I couldn’t let you have it without a fight. I mean why would I, when we have resources who need the work?
So, that cleared things up. They had people on staff who needed to bill their hours somewhere. It wasn’t a process thing. It wasn’t in the best interest of the project. It was greed. They wanted as much of the project as they could get.
Question: Is it a good idea to work with people who will do anything to get as much of the project as they can?
Option 2: The available vendor
Our clients usually don’t approach us with a deadline or a specific window they need us to work within. They’re usually flexible enough to wait for us, in those rare cases when we’re already engaged on a project. That said, there have been a handful of cases we had to refer a new opportunity because the client needed it quicker than we could deliver.
In many cases clients aren’t looking for the best service they can get, they’re just looking for satisfactory service. This gives them the opportunity to consider partners that are merely satisfactory.
I’m of the mind that the best service providers have a steady stream of business, this makes them harder to work with from a scheduling perspective. Selecting a satisfactory partner, because they’re available, may work in certain circumstances but shouldn’t be the standard method of selecting partners. When it becomes the standard method of selecting partners, you’ll get used to working with satisfactory people and begin expecting satisfactory deliverables. What’s worse, you’ll stop recognizing those tacit qualities that really fantastic partners bring to the table.
Question: Is it a good idea to work with people just because they’re available?
Option 3: The internal resource
This is another symptom of only requiring satisfactory work. When you have competent internal resources, why would you seek out a specialist? Hostile Sheep is usually engaged when organizations either don’t have internal resources or the internal resource recognizes they need specialist support. The latter is quite rare. Usually, an internal resource would take an opportunity to expand their skillsets, rather than admit they need support.
The reality is, internal resources can learn a lot from external partners; especially when external partners are master crafts-people with deep expertise in a particular specialty. Many of our clients include junior team members on projects we’re engaged on; they get the opportunity to ask questions, evaluate our approach, and learn from our documentation.
What was the purpose of building internal capabilities? Was the goal to create a centre of excellence? The best of the best? If so, if you have the most talented internal resources, you should be waiting for them to be available. If you’re really investing in building a world-class internal team, USE THEM! The problem is, 80% of internal resources were hired for financial reasons or optics. Here’s a typical scenario: the C-suite notices the organization has enough work to support hiring a full-time employee and does so. Now the organization has one resource, say an experience designer, who needs enough billable hours to justify the position. Another common scenario: external stakeholders perceive the organization as lacking something (i.e. strategy, SEO, marketing, content, design expertise). Organizational leadership decides to make a ‘strategic hire’ who will change external perception. “We’re more credible now that we have a strategist on staff.”
Questions: Are your internal resources really passionate or are they delivering just-enough to justify their job? Are these resources really helping your business or are they actually harming your organization?
Option 4: The best vendor or resource
This seems like the obvious choice. If you have access to a world-class resource, why would you use anyone else? Well, I’m a world-class researcher and experience designer — and that makes Hostile Sheep a high demand shop and more expensive than other options. So, this leads to two separate issues:
- Top-tier talent is often busy and unavailable to be hired. If you have flexible timelines, you may be able to work with top-tier talent more frequently. If you have strict timelines, you may have to settle for whoever is available.
- Top-tier talent is often more expensive. At Hostile Sheep we mitigate our expense by keeping the team small. While we are more expensive than a freelancer or internal resources, we are much less expensive than other experience design firms.
The other issue with hiring top-tier talent is, when a firm is in high demand, they get to pick-and-choose what projects they work on. You may NEED someone to create experience design guidelines for your app but if your app is intended to sell cigarettes (or something else deemed unseemly), you may find top-tier talent hesitant come on board.
Question: If you want to hire top-tier talent, do you have a project that can attract them?
Choosing who you want to work with isn’t as simple as it seems on the surface. In fact, assembling a team is one of the most difficult things anyone will do in business. Not only does your team need to use resources and partners who have the right skillsets, they need to have the right experience, the right amount of passion, the right fee-structure, the right availability, and they need to work well with everyone else on the team.
It’s easy to identify people who are unqualified or people who’ve let you down in the past; these are the people you won’t hire. It’s significantly more difficult to identify people who are delivering satisfactory work. It’s hard to ask for more — because their work is SATISFACTORY; by definition, it satisfies your needs. Until you’ve worked with top-tier talent, who completely blows your expectations out of the water, you may not know what you should be demanding from your resources and partners.
We’ve ruined many of our clients for other research or experience design firms. Our clients compare their work to the work we’ve provided and are generally disappointed. Most of our competitors can’t offer as through, as valuable, as easy-to-understand, or as quick work as we can. That’s why 80% of work (this year) has come from repeat customers.
