I’m about to do something I’ve never done before: send our clients a photo of a hastily scribbled whiteboard to explain how we’ve been approaching their million-dollar ask.
After a day of debate, we’ve hit a snag. We get on a quick call with three clients, hoping they know something we don’t. Turns out, they do. Ten minutes later the call wraps and everyone feels good about the decision.
In the agency world, there’s a lot of pressure to be right. In the not so distant past, we only felt comfortable bringing clients the final answer – one that showed off our brilliant thinking. But the problems we face when it comes to digital today are exponentially more complex than those we were trying to solve even half a decade ago. There’s really no chance of getting it right the first time.
Clients, as the voice of the business, as well as digital experts in their own right, need a better seat at the table, not just as arbiters but also as creators.
The secret to making that possible is transparency – a “show our underwear” mindset that supports collaboration and produces the best products. Let’s shed the agency aversion to sharing mistakes and take the opposite approach: exposing the wrong ideas, bad assumptions and delays in schedule, right alongside the good ideas, smart assumptions and efficiencies.
Shifting how we work together
There’s an old adage in the design community: don’t share anything you don’t like with clients in case they fall in love with it and pick the wrong option. It’s this kind of thinking that has to disappear; embracing transparency requires reinventing client engagement.
That same client who got to see a picture of our whiteboard also attended our (normally internal) product scrums for several days every other week. We’d show all our work, including what we didn’t like, and talked openly about why something was broken, sometimes before we even had a better solution in place. We critiqued our work, then critiqued each other’s feedback on the work, including the client’s.
We also used this kind of team model to redesign TED’s website. We had frequent, direct access to key decision makers at the company. They worked face-to-face with our agency’s design team multiple times a week, which means they saw successes and failures in real time and collaborated with every team member, from the most junior to senior.
There were no formal presentations. We printed off work or showed materials directly from our phones. We didn’t even book our “client-friendly” conference rooms. The TED team hung out in the war room, side-by-side with our entire crew. None of this is an excuse to get sloppy. In fact, this much transparency will quickly expose if there’s a weak link on the team.
This kind of approach, which we now use for more than a third of our clients, allows us to test assumptions and put requirements in context. We see problems sooner and know what the internal pressures our clients might be facing when they sell an idea. They feel confident in the process, the rationale and the micro decisions. In essence, it lets us create faster and create better.
Transparency is an acquired taste
When transparency works, it works really well, especially for the most innovative projects, when the decisions are many and the implications big. But of course, total transparency isn’t feasible with every client.
There are a host of factors to consider:
- Clients must be interested in seeing incomplete thoughts: Some are not. They have pressures to succeed and a manager, president or chief executive to please, which can make for less tolerance for nascent ideas. So we adjust how we communicate and take time to add more polish. The more these clients can picture-share something with their boss’ boss, the more positive the relationship will be.
- Sometimes a client isn’t empowered to make the day-to-day decisions needed for this model to work: For them, the constant invitation to participate can become stressful instead of exciting. We work closely with these clients to avoid a big reveal, but the partnership still won’t be as intimate.
- Space is good thing: One of the most unexpected insights from this model is that sometimes having a client next to you every day is not the most efficient way to work. Product teams have good days, when something takes a big leap forward, and bad days when 12 tries doesn’t lead to anything better. Like any good relationship, a little space is a good thing.
In many cases, the benefits of transparency outweigh these qualifications. We need to rethink how we expose the progression of our work to clients. It’s rare for a digital project to go according to plan. Yet historically, agencies have felt obligated to pretend they can predict the future and then scramble to compensate when perfectly normal surprises come up.
This is where transparency becomes our friend. By openly acknowledging where things stand, we’re building trust. As long as we approach a client’s problem with passion, smart planning and an open mind to that plan changing, we can all make better things.
This is an edited extract of a feature first published in the SoDA report 2015
Emily Wengert is group vice-president of user experience at Huge, Brooklyn
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