A year of being a designer in consulting

What a year of working as a consultant in experience design has helped me shape my experience as a designer and how it improved the approach of helping organisations improve their customers’ lives

Image by Headaway

Introduction

For the past year and after having led teams of digital product designers at a few start-ups and medium size companies I transitioned back into a consulting role as part of Slalom Build, where we partner with organisations from all industries and all over the globe to design and develop new products or improve existing ones.

We work using a framework called PEM (Product Engineering Methodology, you can read more about it here and as part of it we form agile squads that work closely with the client, stakeholders and users to design and build those products. Within PEM there are multiple phases where we, product designers, have to lead multiple initiatives following different methodologies and frameworks all around the User-centred design process.

A year of learning

From being in a leadership/managerial role for the past few years to return to an IC (individual contributor) was what felt, in the beginning, like a set-back…