Making the Jump From Agency to Product

Designing UX within a product company is quite different than working from the outside as an agency or consultant. How would I know, you ask? I recently made this transition and the differences are all still quite fresh for me.

For more than 20 years, my focus was on helping other companies solve tough challenges with their brand, interacting with their customers and building better digital products. Whether you call it an agency or a consultancy, the purpose of that work was to understand my customer’s business well enough to provide them meaningful recommendations and solutions that would help their business prosper. Earlier this year, I took a role at RetailMeNot as the Head of Design, turning my focus toward providing service and support for one company from within.

By sharing my experience as I made this transition, hopefully you are inspired to make the career move to a product company. If you are already within a product company, perhaps you’ll be energized by seeing your company through a fresh perspective.

It’s All Connected

My second day at RetailMeNot was filled with a full day meeting of global prioritization, as we planned out the next six sprints of work for our Product and Engineering teams. I was immediately in deep water: acronyms, metrics, dependencies and product history. It was like trying to listen to a conversation in a foreign language you sort of know; you get the gist of the meaning and there are familiar words but you just have to accept that you missed a lot.

It took about a month before I felt I could speak this language fluently. Discipline and acceptance is necessary so you don’t become frustrated or overwork yourself trying to learn it all. Accept the fact that you’ll never know everything that transpired over the product history or you’ll exhaust yourself trying. Build knowledge to make informed decisions and rely on support from your team and colleagues to fill in the gaps. It’s important to build relationships, seeking out subject matter experts in the company as well as company historians who can provide perspective.

While working from the outside, there was likely a tremendous amount of context, history and nuance I wasn’t aware of. The more quickly you can immerse yourself into the culture and cadence of the organization, the more you will know the important questions to ask. Whether you are new to the company or not, it’s not realistic to know everything. Rather than becoming overwhelmed, remain curious and always seek a deeper understanding of your product and its users.

With that, here are a few things that are good to remember when you’re joining a product team:

Don’t get overwhelmed, you’ve got (some) time to learn

• It’s important to learn the minutia, context and history
• Even small decisions can have a big impact
• Build knowledge to make informed decisions and rely on tribal support to fill in the gaps — build strong relationships you can count on

Your success is tied to your product, not your last client relationship

• Realizing the success of your product is constant and lasting, so know that this is usually a cumulative result rather than a quick win
• Own your future — don’t let the past decisions that have led to the current product preclude the future potential of the product experience

Time moves incredibly fast

• There’s often so much going on and so much communication happening that a week goes by in an instant — being intentional is key to getting things accomplished
• Establish a meeting cadence and stick to it, to make sure time doesn’t slip on what’s important — obsess on a schedule

Making the move to product has been a very rewarding experience. I’ve already learned so much about the mechanics of building our product and the relationship with our users to a level I’ve not experienced before as a consultant. The connections I have with the people I work with to create product at RetailMeNot are more richly tied together, because our future success truly is dependent on each other.