TEAM AUGMENTATION, RESOURCING AND UX CAPABILITY

The right people, the right skills, right now.

What would you create if you had instant access to world-class Product, UX and Research talent?

Augment your team with top tier professionals backed by Each&Other's two decades of industry experience.

Who we're working with

BNP PARIBAS
Glenveagh
Racing Digital

Plugging almost two decades of product delivery experience directly into your team.

Scale your team rapidly –

Solve resourcing gaps in product teams with top tier UX and design talent.

- Back fill rolls

- Rapidly increase capacity

- Bring in specialist-skills

- Cover pat/mat leave for critical team members

Target rapid product release –

Deploy full teams to increase the velocity of product release.

- Join existing agile development teams

- Multidisciplinary UX/UI/Research and product management squads

- Act as an independent UX unit, to deliver on defined product goals.

Enhance product delivery –

Rapidly build out delivery capability and solve technical problems –

- Experienced product owners

- Technical architects

- Front end development resources

When there is a big hill to climb, fast, you need a team that can get you there.

Pull what you need from the best UX talent pool in the world.

We have a new approach to Team Augmentation that combines the best of consultancy with the value of boots on the ground.

  • When you need to consider budgets for longer projects
  • When the contours of a project are not fully defined, but the deadlines are set
  • When you need closer collaboration with business and devs

We're different in 4 ways:

Each&Other play book

UX methods that focus on practical delivery and high quality results.

Director-level oversight

Weekly check-ins and crits with an assigned Each&Other Principal on in-flow work.

Account management

Dedicated account management for escalations, issues, and service.

World-class talent

Candidates for roles that we stand behind in quality, attitude and savvy.

Serious companies use us to drive serious change —

BNP Paribas [International]

A 5+ year programme working alongside BNP team members, transforming how international fund and securities work for internal fund managers and high net-worth clients.

  • Supplying UI, UX, research, service design and content.
  • Up to Five UX/UI/Content Designers embedded at a time
  • Mapping user needs and journeys across the business and across geographies
  • Embedding foundational UI design assets and UX methodologies
  • Shipping game-changing products.

Logitech [EU & USA]

Deep partnership across multiple hardware and software teams in EU and USA driving innovation and supporting mission critical releases.

  • UI resources to increase velocity of delivery
  • UX, research, industrial design to increase team capability
  • Supporting strategic decision-making in user needs, user workflow in gaming and productivity.
  • Working on updates to existing software and in-development products.

Racing Digital – UK

A revolutionary platform to unify workflows across channels, tasks & user groups Delivering complex platform for multiple niche users, working and collaborating together asynchronously, across devices and geographies.

  • 3 year programme
  • De-facto in-house team with 3 UX/UI Designers
  • Part-time Director of Design
  • Additional content & Research resources deployed.
  • Distributed team (UK, IRL, SA)

Create the team you need from the best UX talent pool in the world.

Design Leadership at your ServiceDesign Leadership at your Service

There’s little point in running fast unless you’re running in the right direction. For growing companies, that translates to hiring leaders who can build the structures needed for the business to scale effectively. Design is one of those structures: it’s essential to get it right if you want to stand out in the market. But that only happens when design is strategically aligned with the business, and for that, you need leadership. As Brian touched on in the most recent blog, design leadership can remove obstacles to growth like poor user experience. So let’s dig in to three reasons why it’s worth engaging a design leader and how they can deliver value. 1. To provide strategic direction and alignment A design leader ensures design efforts are aligned with business goals, customer needs and cross-functional initiatives in the company. Leaders provide a clear picture of how design drives and supports business success. They also offer clear direction for how design teams work with their product, marketing, and engineering counterparts.  Without this strategic oversight and direction, companies risk scattering their design resources on low-impact initiatives: put another way, they risk working on the wrong things at the wrong time. 2. To set a compelling vision Design leaders establish a compelling vision that guides day-to-day execution and long-term innovation. When a vision is aligned to the strategy like I’ve described above, it clarifies the design team’s contribution to the business. Where design leadership is absent, we see designers struggling to make directed strategic and tactical impact. Without a vision for design, companies risk making only incremental improvements to their product and as a result, they struggle to establish a unique identity in the market. Having a vision also makes it easier to staff up a design team, by giving candidates an inspiring reason to join. 3. To build a strong design culture Design thrives in an environment where creativity, collaboration and problem solving are nurtured. A design leader advocates for design at the leadership level, and demonstrates value in quantifiable terms to the business. They establish best practices and processes to ensure design succeeds at the company, and they develop and mentor design talent to foster high-performance teams. The hiring dilemma The contribution a strong design leader makes is clear. The challenge is in hiring.  Finding design leaders who can do what I’ve described here, who have built up the right skills and experience, isn’t easy, or cheap. (I’ll come back to the cost question later.) As a growing company, it may be tough to recruit design leaders in competition with  established companies offering senior executive Head of Design or VP roles. Leaders may be slow to take a risk on an up-and-coming player. But not having design leadership in place could hold back a company from scalable growth in the future. How can they square this circle? One solution is not to think of design leadership as a full-time role but as a fractional one. Enter the fractional design leader A fractional design leader is an external, independent expert who provides strategic design guidance to companies on an as-needed basis. Fractional design leaders are deployed in different ways: a business might need one to tackle a very specific challenge over a short period of time. Other times – most cases, in fact – they become a resource you engage with over longer periods. The advantage of longer-term engagements is the same advantage gained from hiring: familiarity, reliability, and a shared stake in company success. It’s an arrangement that may suit both sides; design leaders with many years under their belts may prefer to spread the ‘risk’, so instead of going all in with one startup, they divide their time between different engagements. Growing companies that aren't yet certain about trajectory and direction de-risk the ‘big hire’ of choosing the right design leader, and can test the water, so to speak. Retaining a fractional design leader brings three benefits fast: 1. Immediate strategic and tactical impact They can quickly identify issues and implement solutions. As well as the strategic vision I talked about earlier, they’re also really useful for quick tactical wins. For instance, problems with culture and ways of working tend to show up in distinct, recognisable ways. Experienced leaders know what to look for; they can spot issues fast, identify the root causes and take immediate action to put things right. For example, where ways of working, or communication, are holding back growth, the leader can introduce frameworks to put this right. Where innovation and creativity is lacking, a leader can develop a culture where risks are rewarded, and the unit of value is learning. 2. Guided team growth Growth companies may have unclear hiring priorities, and leaders can apply their years of experience to help the business define the right roles to hire. This builds an efficient, scalable team with a development path, not a loose group that’s only put together to solve short-term problems. When they know the business roadmap, design leaders can determine if the team needs UX designers, system thinkers, or people with a background in industrial design. And with a nod to the trend everyone’s talking about, they’ll also have a view on how to integrate AI into the team. 3. Laying the foundations for a resilient and scalable design team A fractional design leader can mix the tactical and the strategic – spotting things to put right from day one, while also staying aligned with the bigger picture. Their experience in the market means they’ll often know designers in their network who are available to work on a particular challenge. And through coaching and mentoring, they can increase the value of the team that’s already in place. In many cases, a fractional head of design is an approach that works for both sides. Obviously there are cost and flexibility advantages to be gained by hiring a fractional leader in preference to a full-time hire. However, cost should not be the primary lens. A strong design leader is not a cost centre, they are a value creator. Good ones – fractional or otherwise – are not cheap, but having them in place gives growing companies the best opportunity to leverage the strategic and competitive value of design, and scale successfully.

by Donnacha Costello

Learn more about what we do

– Our approach

– UX/UI and Product Design

– UX Research & Product strategy

– Service Design

– UX/AI and Innovation

– Fractional Head of UX Design

– UX Team Augmentation & capability

Or get in touch to talk about what we can do for your organisation.

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