Bryan Mason, Sarah Nelson, Ryan Freitas, Jesse James Garrett
Failure is a by-product of pushing yourself. You can’t escape it.
When We Take The Wrong Project
JJG: What makes a good project for us for me is a handful of criteria. Most important thing is interesting problems to solve. Problems we haven’t had a chance to sink our teeth into. Second thing is good people to collaborate with. Work in close collaboration with our clients. Best clients are the ones we can learn from. Looking for projects that can have an impact in the world. Clients have to have the ability and commitment to execute what we do. And willing to spend the money to bring us in. If all the other things are in place, the dollars are less important.
BM: When do we get that wrong?
JJG: When we misplace our priorities. When we let one factor to override the others. Most often it happens when we take on follow-up work with a client. It’s easy for us to say yes, without thinking about if it is a good project for us.
BM: How do we not do that anymore?
JJG: Constantly remind yourself what matters. Easy to lose sight of that. Really look at every opportunity that comes through the door, regardless of where it comes from.
Q: What do you do with internal clients? It just comes to you.
RF: The amount of attention you apply to projects is how you can control it.
BM: You can always quit.
JJG: Go back and tell your bosses we told you to quit.
(Laughter)
Q: How does AP find good clients?
Laura Kirkwood: They have to understand what they’re talking about. They have to have a team. They have to have us participate in the important conversations. It’s about mutual respect and engaging a problem together. It’s about figuring out a problem together.
RF: We do go through a very intensive process, but we still get it wrong. We get too excited about a problem or a client.
BM: Or everything changes once you are on the ground for a project.
Andrew Crow: We had a recent project that had a problem we were really engaged with and when we got there, they basically swapped the project on us. But having the rug pulled out from under us spooked us a bit.
RF: This happens on internal teams all the time.
SN: One of the things that is really challenging is that so much of the work is about people and people dynamics. Often early in a project, you need to establish how you act early in the project. But this doesn’t happen because you don’t know them and you want to understand the dynamics. If you sit back, it can set up a strange dynamic.
AC: We didn’t have the respect from the client, so when we needed to guide them or change things, there was no mutual respect.
When There is “No Time for Research”
Todd Wilkens: One of the things we often run into is companies telling you, “We have reams and reams of research and report, so you don’t have to do research, just design.” And you get there and it’s a marketing report. But you can’t tell people, “Hey, you really don’t know your customers.”
RF: There is always “Get on with the designing.” A hope you can just jump into the middle of a problem. Clients’ enthusiasm can be infectious. I’ve given too high-fidelity concepts to clients and then they get stuck on that and look at every level of detail. Need to have an appropriate level of fidelity. I continue to get it wrong, even after ten years of doing this. Delivering comps can be very dangerous.
Off-The-Rails in the MIddle of a Project
BM: Often the in-flight corrections make the problems worse.
AC: “If we just did this, it would be even better…” Those types of things–and you want to please the client–cause scope creep and budget and timeline and then they compound and build up and might keep you from launching at all. We should have been able to take a firmer stance. Didn’t have the ability to even say stop.
SN: We teach people how to treat us. What messages are we sending out? Are we a doormat, a vendor, a partner? It’s a fundamental problem.
BM: No one hires a consulting company unless they have a real problem to solve. People we like are in a bad spot. So how do we play bad cop with people that we like?
SN: I’m a horrible bad cop, so I usually make someone else do it, like a project manager or someone else in the organization.
JJG: If what you are doing is bad cop/bad cop, you need the good cop. Without a good cop, it puts you at odds with the client.
TW: Sometimes it is not just about being firm, but the root cause of the problem is that you aren’t talking about the right thing. Fighting over silly stuff like the number of wireframes.
RF: Recognizing the human element in things.
BM: What happens when you lose an executive sponsor?
RF: You make your life a nightmare. Need a bottom up approach to foster change. When it doesn’t work is when the people in charge are scared. CEO waited me out and once I was gone, all my work went away as well.
LK: Remember who your actual client is. It’s often not the person you are working with every day. It’s often people up above and you need to keep the ear of those people.
BM: Getting senior buy-in can open doors as well as cover your ass.
Q: How you talk internally that fosters these stories these way? We want to blame clients naturally.
BM: Every tuesday we talk about every project we’re working on and all the problems.
SN: You can start to see patterns between projects so it’s not a one-off event and we can all learn from. We have a tolerance for failure culture. It becomes a learning event, not something for disciplinary action.
BM: Although it can be that too!
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