Improvment of the Operations of the Design Department at AGIMA
AGIMA is a digital production agency operating in EMEA and NORAM, with more than 550 employees worldwide. In 2019, I joined the agency as the head of the design department. During my tenure at the agency, my team and I have completed around 120 projects.
Goals
Increase the profitability of the design department
Make AGIMA’s design great again
To solve both tasks, we needed to do three things:
Reducing Costs
We revised the design processes and found several growth points.
Implemented checklists.
This helps save time on revisions. With checklists, it’s harder to forget some obvious things, like designing a favicon or a 404 page. We do everything in one go without having to return to the project with constant revisions. Or to miss a kickoff/team briefing (yes, this really happened, and the team would start preparing the design before they fully understood what design was needed).
Prepared templates for cases.
Preparing one case used to take several months of intense work. We abandoned the individual design for each case. Instead, we prepared a case builder with an admin panel on our website. And we found that we were releasing four times as many cases in the same amount of time. And although the conversion from a single case became slightly less, the large amount of work increased the number of leads overall. However, we left a “safety valve” for the design team — we present selected cases on Behance, and we approach each such case with love. This doesn’t give direct conversions, but it significantly affects the good mood of the design team, which is very important.
Designers have the opportunity to show their best side, and try to show all their passion for design by making cases on Behance. The only restriction is not to show anything under NDA
Organized an internship program for designers.
Sometimes we take on several inexperienced designers for internships. We select the most talented ones and train them according to our standards. It’s a win-win situation:
Designers get real experience in a top team on real projects under the mentorship of strong practitioners. After our internship, everyone easily finds a job. A third of the interns eventually work for us.
We get an inexpensive resource. Interns work according to our templates and standards. After a 3-month internship, we confidently give them commercial tasks at a rate lower than we would pay an external freelancer, and we get a predictable quality of design.
Improving the Production Process
AGIMA has always been at the forefront of technology. For example, our agency was the first in Russia to do adaptive design. My task was to bring AGIMA back to the forefront by using modern frameworks and methodologies
Implemented quality standards
We added several items to the design acceptance checklists:
Compliance with WCAG 2.0 guides
Use of design system elements
Preparation of interactive prototypes and testing
We also supplement the checklists with requirements not only for clean design but also for using new Figma features, such as Auto Layout. This has helped us return to the cutting edge of design production.
Team Development
My principle is to give designers as many challenges as they can handle. And a little bit more. By maintaining a balance between interesting projects and the best qualities of individual designers, I have been able to develop each team member’s best traits rather quickly. Now we have a team of responsible, independent professionals who can work both autonomously and in a team. At the same time, each of us plays the role of a mentor for colleagues. Thus, designers started to grow professionally more quickly.
Conference on Ethics in Design
We wanted to organise a big conference in Moscow on design ethics. We started looking for speakers and raised the topic in the community. I gave a presentation called “Ethics in Design: New Approaches” at a few industry conferences, to check the interest in the subject. But unfortunately, the global pandemic has ruined our plans.
Speaking about ethics in design at Izhevsk conference
Getting More Design Contracts from Our Clients
The primary source of new clients and new challenges in the market is participation in tenders for large companies. We have managed to almost double our win rate by more carefully elaborating on competition tasks and refraining from those challenges in which we cannot give our 100%.
Cross-Functional Team
For each tender, we assemble a full team of specialists: UX researchers, analysts, and designers. This way, we thoroughly work through the task and demonstrate our expertise and team power.
A Deferred Process
We have an established process that includes brainstorming, design, and preparation of our proposal presentation. Based on experience, we understand how much time is allocated for each stage, and we use templates and checklists to save time. For example, we have detailed, simple instructions for each team member on how to record high-quality, studio-level sound video at home using two phones and one sock.
Quality Presentation of Our Work
Our proposal presentation is usually accompanied not only by designs inserted into good mock-ups. Thanks to the streamlined process, we manage to create interface animations, as well as record and edit the story of all experts on the team on video. In this video, we tell how we came to the solution and explain every significant aspect of our work.
Recording a video explaining the design concept to the client
Result
Launched an internship programme: two out of three interns now work in a team.
Improved the tendering process: we now win 50% of the tenders we enter.
The agency's projects have won over 40 local and international design awards.
AGIMA has become an ambassador of a contemporary approach to design for our clients.
Although the design department's profits haven't increased dramatically (only by 30%), they have at least remained stable, which is not the case for many agencies in the Russian market these days.
We have significantly improved our position in all local ratings, with the biggest jump being from 40th to 14th place.
Conclusion
Working with the AGIMA team was like working with a dream team. In many ways, everything was accomplished thanks to the support of all my colleagues. I am grateful to the team for allowing me to bring all my experience and for enriching me with new expertise and knowledge. We have risen in all local rankings, in some by dozens of points. We announced ourselves to the market as a powerful force in product design. We had fun and created a lot of excellent designs for our clients.