Lean UX, 3rd Edition

Chapter 18. Lean UX in an Agency

Much of the focus of this book has been explicitly about making Lean UX work inside a product company or within a product group inside a larger business or organization. While the majority of that advice can be applied in any setting, it’s worth calling out explicitly the differences needed to make Lean UX work at an agency.

For the sake of this discussion, when we say “agency,” we mean any organization that sells services to a client. This could be a small four-person design studio in Portland, Oregon, or a thousand-person marketing agency in London. What makes Lean UX uniquely challenging in this environment is, in a word, clients. It’s difficult for agencies to bring new ways of working to clients that find these ways of working foreign to their culture. Now, in some cases, this will be the exact reason your agency was hired. In others, it will be a foreign approach continuously threatened by corporate antibodies resistant to different ways of working. Either way, it will be difficult.

In this chapter, we’ll cover five key elements to consider as you attempt to bring modern ways of working to your company.

What Business Do You Want to Be In?

Agencies are almost always in the deliverables business. They get paid to deliver a design, a prototype, some research, or a working piece of software. This business model conflicts with Lean UX and its focus on outcomes.

The traditional agency business model is simple: clients pay for deliverables—designs, ...