This document contains a mix of technical formulas, text, and figures with no clear overall topic. The text sections discuss building successful digital product teams and improving an organization's digital capabilities. It notes that clients increasingly ask agencies to help upskill their digital teams. The document provides perspectives on developing digital products, including choosing the right agency partner, understanding an organization's strengths, and bringing an agency mindset in-house. It emphasizes that there is no single solution and the best approach depends on an organization's unique characteristics.

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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

2. Issue #3

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

4. 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 find or rediscover its footing is imposing.
Moreover, it’s daunting to contrive and maintain support capabilities in a shifting
organisation. Even defining 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 efficient 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 nonexistent, so a one-size-fits-all approach
is more or less fictitious. 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.
Defining a mission that’s actionable is critical. It remains fluid and serves as both a
reminder of our legacy and of how we’ll adapt in the coming months. Furthermore,
it outlays a unified commitment while staying agile. As the team embraces the
mission, they can upskill 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 adaptive
Don’t adopt methodologies just
because they work for others.
Instead, commit to trial and error
until you find yours.
Identical company cultures are non-existent, so a one-
size-fits-all approach is more or less fictitious.
Be unified
Set and share regular mission
statements as targets for what
success means right now,keeping it
transparent as and when it changes.

5. 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 office 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 unflattering insight of your business that
is frequently difficult to obtain from within. Nonbiased 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 fit 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 collaboration
Small changes to environment –
like taking down desk partitions
– can encourage creativity and
collaboration.
Sell your story
Recruit 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 team
Choose a partner for a longterm
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.

6. 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.

7. 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 long­standing 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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

11. 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.

12. 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.”

13. 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
in­house. 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 business
to have confidence in the
digital product team.

14. 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 buying­in 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 ‘up­skill’ 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

15. Five principles
of collaboration
12 3
4
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.
1
Learn by doing
We 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 fit all
2One approach does not fit all
2Every 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 fit all.
2challenge. One process certainly does not fit all.
2
4Collaboration is not
4Collaboration is not
4design by committee
4design by committee
4We 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.
5
Tangible outcomes
5
Tangible outcomes
5
build momentum
5
build momentum
5
We believe that the best way to build
5
We 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 confidence of internal teams
5increase the confidence of internal teams
5and increase visibility across the business.
5and increase visibility across the business.
5
3Pushing frameworks and
3Pushing frameworks and
3toolkits on design teams3toolkits on design teams3rarely works
We 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.

16. For more articles and insight, visit:
www.thehumanlayer.com
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Wilson Fletcher is a digital service design studio.
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helps forward-thinking organisations shape their digital strategy and
deliver world-class experiences across all digital platforms.
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