Design is difficult. Taking raw capabilities and ideas and blending them together into something which people want to use, enjoy using and keep coming back to is very often the thing which separates those businesses which become successful from those which wither and die.
The services on offer via Outpost are a collection of tools designed to make that difficult process easier for you and your business.
Strategic Design Consultancy
Those early days of building a product are full of design decisions which will set the direction of your business for years to come. I can help in de-risking your product launch with good design decisions, information architecture, product flows, prototypes and design systems. All of which will set you off on the right foot as you start building something brilliant.
We might also at this stage look at the competitive landscape and work together to identify ways to stand out from, or one-up your competitors. This type of consultancy is hands on, and we’ll be working collaboratively to tackle a set of questions which are of the highest strategic importance to your business. Our outputs might be actual tangible product artefacts, or a corpus of knowledge which you can use to fuel and accelerate decision making.
This type of engagement best suits business who have a clear list of design questions to tackle, and are ready to work on them.
Fractional Design Leadership
If the consultancy approach outlined above feels too narrow in scope, you can also opt to hire me to work in a much more holistic and integrated fashion through a fractional leadership engagement. In this type of role you get a leader able to work across an organisation doing all of the things you’d expect from an internal design erred, but without the long-term commitment and overheads. We’ll work together on things like organisational design, hiring, performance management, user experience design, user research, tooling, design systems etc.
This type of engagement best suits businesses who know they need someone to come in and help with design, but perhaps don’t know the exact todo list.
UX & Product Analysis
Having spent the last twenty five years designing, building and obsessing over digital products and services, I have A keen eye for what makes and breaks products. An in-depth analysis of your product might be right for you if you are looking for ways to better connect with your audience, to improve conversion rates, or to add new offerings to your service. It might be that you want to narrow the gap to your competitors and an in-depth assessment of the points of differentiation will help you to make roadmap decisions for your product and technology teams. The typical artefacts for this kind of work are a written report alongside a set of supporting visuals.
This type of engagement best suits businesses who have identified a need to change direction, and want support in figuring out what that looks like.
Design Leadership Coaching
I have been fortunate enough throughout my career to work with some brilliant people who have served as coaches and mentors at crucial times in my own professional development, and I know what a valuable tool coaching can be for anyone who is serious about doing their work well, and is willing to invest their time into it. Coaching engagements can be one-off meetings with specific short-term objectives like supporting you in a job search or interview process, or could be ongoing engagements where we tackle whatever it is that is top of your todo list. In the past I have helped coaching clients with organisational design questions, personal development challenges, tricky people management problems, etc.
This type of engagement best suits current and prospective design leaders who are serious about professional growth and have a set of personal objectives we can work on together.
Writing & Presenting
Whilst the other services offered through Outpost are tailored towards single organisations and individuals, I think there is a place for more generalised information to be shared to wider audiences through conferences, internal talks and essays. Alongside my writing on Design Leadership Memos, I sometimes speak at industry conferences and to internal teams about topics such as Product Design, Design Leadership, Team Culture, Experimentation, Design Systems and Scaling Design Organisations.