Design: Strategic Partner with a Point of View

Design Management Review, Summer 2004 by Richardson, Adam, Roy, Jojo

Expanding a client relationship so that it embraces a long-term vision, as well as commissions for individual projects, offers benefits to both customer and designer. Adam Richardson and Jojo Roy spell out these advantages. More significantly, they outline and illustrate key dimensions of consulting-including recommendations on hiring talent, project types, and alternative methods of compensation-that support this broader collaboration.

The beginning of the twenty-first century has been good for design. Design awareness is at an all-time high in the popular press and with the general public. Just as important, corporations increasingly realize the value design brings to their products, brands, and overall relationship with their customers. . .but it's not the value you might expect. Sure, design is great at making things look better and at addressing real user and market needs, but some design firms are also leveraging their multi-dimensional thinking, visioning, and visualization skills to become partners with clients at a strategic level.

Design is unique in advocating an approach based on soul-stirring emotion and vision, customer and brand focus, and pragmatic technology and manufacturing know-how. No other discipline in product development organizations covers quite as much ground, or can so ably communicate the project objectives to the development team (vital for keeping things on course). But design's impact is limited if not properly connected with larger business practices, which puts designers-especially consultancies-in a largely reactive position. Well-known exceptions aside, designers have had spotty success at communicating their message to the top of client organizations and at gaining a voice in steering the ship.

This article presents a "from the trenches" perspective on initiating and managing strategic partnerships. At frog design, we have been developing an approach to combining strategy and design over the last several years that is geared toward shifting that relationship, allowing us to establish true strategic partnerships with a broad range of clients that have needs in product, digital, and brand design.

Why Strategic Partnerships?

What does a strategic partnership mean, particularly for a design consultancy?

Fundamentally, it means that clients turn to us for advice on which products to make, which customers to serve, which markets to go after, who to partner with, which services to offer, which technologies to develop, and how to competitively position their offerings. Instead of waiting for clients to come to us with projects, we actively think about their businesses and go to them with recommendations for company vision, business models, and product concepts.

There are multiple benefits to establishing strategic partnerships:

* As a design firm, you have access to higher levels of management within the client company, which allows doing work across multiple departments within the organization (breaking out of a silo you might have landed in with your first project).

* You benefit from a more stable flow of work and won't have to face the challenge of constantly seeking new clients.

* Greater familiarity with the client means projects tend to run more smoothly (since methods of communications and decisions are known), and ramp-up time on each project is drastically reduced.

* You avoid the common frustration of being handed pre-defmed products, Web sites, or services to work on, and not having the opportunity to wear your "what if?" hat.

From the client's perspective, there is also an upside: He or she gets a partner who is inherently interested in understanding the client's users; who has an instinctive understanding for brand and how it's manifested through products, services, and experiences; and who provides a viewpoint significantly different from that of traditional business consultants.

In short, becoming a strategic partner shifts a consultancy out of "hired hand" status, called in on a per-project basis. Rather than having clients simply tell you what to design, you can make recommendations about what they should make, and why.

But there is a downside to establishing strategic relationships: It requires considerable and often difficult changes in approaches, staffing, and even internal billing methods for the design firm. It requires a more active approach than the typical scenario in which a client walks in with a well-defined design problem. This can involve a shift in approaches to business development and the creation of dedicated strategy groups (still a rarity in design firms, perhaps because they are seen as cost centers or overhead). Strategy groups can navigate among the short-term demands of specific project strategies while couching the design firm's guidance in a long-term, strategic roadmap or framework. Strategy groups can help get design firms out of the fray of tactical project work and provide the type of big-picture thinking that gets clients engaged in partnerships.