Startups over Agencies?

Hello! This is my first time publishing my own article with an extremely amateur writing skill. But nobody became great immediately without stepping out for the first time, right?

Just a little bit background about me, i have been working as an UI/UX Designer in two digital agencies based in Kuala Lumpur for the past four and the half years. Building product and owning a product is always my goal, and my interest goes heavily dealing with all the UX problems and of course crafting all the user interface designs.

Fun Fact #1: I get irritated by the term “digital”, as everyone is slowly abusing it nowadays. Perhaps this can be my next article to talk about this?

So after a four and a half years of roller coaster rides 🎢, in January this year I have decided to step out and join Kaodim, a Malaysia-based service marketplace startup that operates in four countries in the region, who just raised $7 million last year. (After all building product is my ultimate goal so i think its a good start for me)

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/06/kaodim-raises-7m/

After joining startup, I would say Startups and Advertising Agencies are very different..Duh, i’m not referring to the difference of both business modals. But more to like how the communication and design process works in both places. Adapting and learning along all this changes leads me to writing this article.

Note: This does not apply to everyone or everywhere, it’s merely based on my experience, from a designer point of view. And i do agree both exists for their very own good reasons. It’s about how much can you learn along the process and how well can you adapt to the environment.

1. Ownership

Agencies: Most of the time we get tasked and paid for that particular project, for an instance a website revamp, an app built or even a digital campaign. Once a project is completed, you would have to reset your mind and immediately immerse yourself to the next project, starting all over again. Understanding the business, the problems, so on and so forth…

Once it’s done, its done. You wouldn’t have the luxury to keep improving your past works, even though its by a really small feature. Because let’s face the reality, there’s no free lunch in this world. How many clients would want to pay you another amount of money just after 6 months you completed a job? It’s not a social media retainer.

Startups: In Startups, we moved on to the next feature once we completed one. However if we see the need to change our design in the later time, we could always bring this up to the Product team and everyone will try to work it out and make it happen. This applies to bugs too, we take them very seriously on a daily basis, lol. So everyone would have AND need to have full ownership for what they are doing, to ensure its a good product.

2. Processes

Agencies: My previous agency is one of the subsidiary company owned by a global multinational advertising giant. Let’s admit that, we claim ourselves as a creative agency, we don’t work like those big corporate companies out there. But we became more and more grounded everyday and there’s something will be there, and always be there that harms us — Layering. In fact, we took an initiative last year and tried pushing our process to be more agile, but we failed quite badly. And all the ugly truths were shown very clearly to us why agile just doesn’t work for us, in an agency. Every department has low visibility on what’s happening on the other side. It’s a process that requires collaborative effort and EVERYONE would have to obey it. So ended up everyone is back running on the waterfall modal which causes a lot of unnecessary miscommunications or we love calling it, a disaster. 😣

Startups: On the other hand, agile encourages rapid, flexible response to change as well as continual improvement. And I’m glad it’s happening at most of the startups. Here we are practicing SCRUM framework. So we would have our weekly sprint planning to ensure everyone is aligned on the scope of work and the effort needed to meet that specific sprint commitment. And we do have our daily standup in the early morning too (even though few years back i used to question the need to do it every morning :D) Do not ever under estimate this 15–20 minutes, because this able to keep everyone on the same line to ensure a smooth delivery. At the end of the weekly sprint, there’s also a sprint retrospective that everyone in the team would voice out any issues and also steps needed to improve in the upcoming sprints. By adapting this agile culture, everyone tends to be more proactive and progressive.

3. Time

Agencies: Designers, how many fucking sleepless nights you have had in the past one month? *pat in the back* Apart from the works that you were briefed earlier, there are plenty of ad-hoc projects or even pitches that might just reached to you anytime. Therefore your time planning wouldn’t go exactly like how you want it to be because you have zero visibility on what’s awaiting you in the next few hours. If that happens (it happens all the time), you just have to embrace it and work it out which often leads to all the unplanned overnights in the office. 🌙👩‍💻👨‍💻🌃

Remember the waterfall modal that i mentioned above, very often you also have to spend unnecessary time to work on all the avoidable extra works.

Startups: Not saying designers in startups are having an extremely good life, though most of my ex-colleagues thought so. 🙄 Well, what’s really making the key difference is we would be educated on the product roadmap in a long run. From there we would have the luxury of visibility to know what we will be working on from time to time and from there designers will have to self-manage the resources and time among the team. And frankly speaking, I have seen and experienced this myself. Design process here(it’s different from the project management process) plays a huge role to make sure we work efficiently as well. Perhaps I could share more about this next time?

4. Results

Agencies: Delivering a good work that gives value to users is our ultimate goal. But how do we justify if its a work that works? Note that we are not just pleasing our users but the clients too, which the latter have the bigger say most of the time. “Customer is always right”, and in our context clients technically are our customers because they are paying for our services. So whenever 💩happens, we might need to bend against our principle to make sure we deliver as requested.

“Fuck you, we’ve had enough of your shit. We are done here.”

I doubt there’re any client servicing who will scream that right in client face. If you do, ping me.

Disclaimer: Of course all the time we will still stand up for what we believe is right, however there’s always a limit when you know either one side would have to compromise to keep things moving.

Startups: Everyone in the team is result driven at all time. Nothing else. Because we don’t have a reason to please anyone in the office. Or put it in another way, who and why do we need to please in the first place? At least I don’t. In reference to the agile modal that mentioned above, startups embraces failure. In this case we would run another iteration if things do not go well as expected. We go on and on until our work is right.

In summary ..

My point is, everyone is aware of the fast moving trend, people no longer put on their full attention on the shrinking traditional advertising. Therefore change is an unavoidable fact to embrace the business transformation. How do we expect something new and different to happen, if we are being so rigid to changes that surrounding us.

I know it is completely ridiculous for the giants to work like startups within the snap of a finger. But I’m pretty sure there’re multiple of ways and different framework out there to act as a guidance for organisations to work towards a more agile culture.

I wouldn’t say one is over another because both are running parallel in their own direction serving its own purpose. It’s really how about how well do you understand yourself and see yourself being in there as a designer in general. There’re good agencies, bad agencies. Good startups as well as bad startups. I hope everyone picks the good side from each other and improve together. Eventually, creating more fabulous works that really contribute to the society is all what we want.

Frankly speaking I still enjoyed my days back then in agencies, who knows one day I might just return to the dark side when things over there get better?

Thank you so much for reading, and sorry for the bad english 🙈. P/s: I’m super new to writing professionally lol.

Appreciate if you could share me your thoughts!