Ask the Expert: Inventing Together Without Re-Inventing Everything
What does “Invent Together” mean for a digital agency?
Our motto, “Invent Together,” is not just allusion to the power of collaboration. It’s also the name of a concrete, battle-tested project methodology that we practice. Whether we’re “inventing together” across our departments, across our IPG network of agencies, or with our clients, our approach prioritizes clear communication and idea-sharing that leads to better efficiency, creative output, and inventive solutioning. We design and build the best possible experiences for our clients, but we also make sure that they will be sustainable, governable, and effective at solving the challenges we set out to respond to in the first place.
How does our website design approach save clients time and money?
One element we bring to every project is a team-wide working session to analyze where we can apply previous learnings and development methodology to new projects. We want our clients to get the biggest bang for their buck, which means that we don’t want to waste time building the simple, predictable, repeatable features and components that form the foundation of most website development projects over and over again. For that reason, we’ve created foundations across our various capabilities, from UX to design to development, to ensure that each project benefits from those that came before. These include best-practice, plug-and-play assets such as:
- Strategy - Briefs that combine industry research with aggregated project learnings
- UX - Industry-specific persona and journey playbooks
- Design - Design system pattern and element libraries
- Development - Accelerator libraries for development
- Project Management - turn-key tools for risk-tracking, forecasting, and scoping
You may be wondering at this point, “Doesn’t starting work from something pre-existing, like a component library, makes the resulting designs feel cookie-cutter?” Well, actually, the opposite is true. By starting from these shared foundations, we can save time on the inputs to an activity, and help us get started faster than if we were looking at a blank page. This way, we can free up 100% of our time and clients’ budgets to focus on building out new outputs, like features, visual identities, and interaction patterns that make new experiences truly unique. These foundations are responsive, performant, accessible, and a great leg up for any new project.
How do we keep optimizing our design and development approach over time?
To ensure we are always getting the most from our process, a final factor in our “Invent Together” approach is our hard-core devotion to continuous improvement. We geek out about team retrospectives. What worked yesterday might not be working today, under new circumstances; so we stay humble and continually question what will make us more productive, effective and successful. Everyone is welcome to suggest new ideas for ways of working so that we can test and learn, just as we do on the sites we produce.
How can I “Invent Together” with Genuine?
We use this mentality in our client engagements, so if you would like to learn more about how we can help you save time and budget with your next digital experience project, let us know and we would love to tell you more about how we could invent together.