Project accelerants to jumpstart startups
Project: Agency design operations
Role: Design discipline leader, project champion
Conceived of the model, advocated for it among leadership, evangelized on its behalf among staff; wrote strategic briefs and established OKRs necessary to execute on it; assembled a team of discipline experts to develop their respective areas; partnered with other members of leadership to validate the service model in the context of our industry and market conditions.
@ DockYard
DockYard is a digital product consultancy that mostly works with growth-stage companies who’ve achieved a market fit and need help scaling to serve their expanding audience. But DockYard often failed to win startup projects with promising companies due to budget and time constraints.
As design director, I witnessed first-hand the misalignment between what our agency offered and what startups really needed — something rapid, spare, and focused on getting something out the door. I spearheaded an effort to close that gap and offer early-stage startups a quicker path to launch by instituting a standard palette of tools optimized for quickly launching a client’s initial product release.
By leveraging our in-house component library and a set of engineering and team process defaults, the path to a working product requires a fraction of the time it would take to build from scratch.
All three disciplines in our product-trio approach to client teams each got their own set of project accelerants. The first was standing up an in-house component library, named StationUI, to mitigate the need to rebuild a design system and front end for every new project. Cloning a Figma file and a basic set of styled Tailwind components at project kickoff allowed us to cut design timelines almost in half.
Our engineering team assembled a number of technical tasks in a GitHub repo that we called FirstFourWeeks, meant to shortcut a month's worth of initial setup, ideally by a junior engineer. And we agreed on a small list of project-management defaults (such as two-week sprints, weekly demos, tracking work in Jira) that were only changeable if the team had a good reason.
In addition to tooling and an accelerated process, we also began experimenting with fractional allocation when assigning team roles. Now DockYard staffs MVP projects with a small team optimized for speed and efficiency — including strategy, design, UXD, and engineering — designed to move quickly to ship a client’s minimum viable product, and start generating actionable insights from real users right away. Team sizes vary based on needs and complexity, and often shift during different phases of a project according to need.
Key to the success of this service offering was interviewing a series of startup founders and advisors, who were generous with their time and their advice. Roy Rodenstein, Martina Hahn, Susan Liao, and Albert Lee all had an enormous impact on our understanding of the challenges early-stage companies face, how diverse founders’ backgrounds and motivations can be, and what needs they are pressured to meet. We revised our approach with their insights and our gratitude.