5 tips for making the jump from freelance and agency design to an in-house UX team

I recently spoke at Dribbble’s Hangtime LA conference about how our product (UX) design team created a strategic vision film to inform future product strategy (If you’re interested in learning about our visioning work checkout some posts starting here). Throughout the conference several attendees stopped me to ask how they could make the transition from doing freelance and agency work to moving to an in-house embedded UX / product design team. I shared a few tips I’ve collected over the years based on my own experiences as both a designer who made the jump from agency to in-house, as well as from the point-of-view of a UX hiring manager. The question came up so many times I thought I’d jot them down and share them.

First off, looking back on my own career, I started off doing freelance work right out of college, and during that time, I did my fair share of agency work. I got to work with a few boutique outfits and even some bigger more established firms on a few projects. I ended up making the move over to an in-house design role over 11 years ago, and although it’s been a little while, I’ve been through the transition myself so I know what it takes. Like many designers I’ve talked to, my jump over to an in-house team was born out of a desire to go deeper on problems than I was able to with contract projects, and to work closely with cross-functional product teams to ship and iterate on ideas and get to great solutions. The transition wasn’t easy, but it was worthwhile, and I’ve never looked back. As a manager I’ve also hired several designers from freelance/agency roles and seen them become successful product designers.

The biggest thing to remember is that going from agency to in-house is like going from being a sprinter to a marathon runner. The in-house experience is all about cultivating relationships with your cross-functional teams and building a deep long-term understanding around a problem space.

So if you’re looking to make the move to in-house and are preparing your portfolio or for an interview, here’s 5 tips to keep in mind:

1. Don’t focus on just the end result, show your entire process. Talk about and show early ideas and iterations, not just the beautiful screens that you delivered at the end to the client. Those end polished screens are great, but they should be the end of your story, not the story itself. It’s ok (even good) to show early ideas that weren’t successful. In fact, it’s necessary to show this early work to show your critical thinking and decision making process as you went from concept to final solution.
2. Back up your design decisions with insights. Even if you don’t have formal research or analytics to back you up, show that you did your own research and synthesis to inform decisions. Hiring managers for in-house teams want to see decisions rooted firmly from insights, with a clear rationale, not subjective choices based on personal intuition. Even if you are only able to do some basic internal testing with colleagues and interviewed friends/family, that still counts! Having a dedicated researcher or research team still isn’t that common, so show your resourcefulness by doing your own research, from concept testing to competitive analysis!
3. Show how you collaborate. An in-house design team’s effectiveness lives and dies by the ability of team members to collaborate well across many functions. Be sure to show how you worked to engage other teammates and clients to show that you’re an excellent communicator and listener. Even if you haven’t worked directly with product managers and engineers, you can still show examples of when you’ve been a successful connector within your team.
4. Go beyond client handoff whenever possible and show experiences that have shipped. Many freelance or agency designers don’t have the chance to actually work on bringing their designs to life. Designs and recommendations get handed off to the client, and oftentimes your designs are changed before they’re implemented, or potentially not implemented for a long time, or at all. Wherever you have an experience that shipped, even if it’s not exactly the design you handed off, show it! And speak to any changes that may have been made after you handed it off. If your design didn’t ship, that’s also ok, but find a way to reflect on the work you did if it didn’t ship — perhaps reflecting on what you would have done next if you’d had the opportunity to iterate on the idea. We all have things we’d do differently given more time or the chance to iterate.
5. Show the impact of your work. It’s not enough for a design to look great when you’re done and for the client to be happy. Tie your work back to the impact it made. And it doesn’t have to just be impact on the end user or client’s business. There’s plenty of other ways to show impact — for example, did the client’s team change how they viewed the problem space because of your design recommendations? Did they change their strategy or change their approach because of the insights and ideas you presented early in the process? Did they change how their team was structured or who worked on the project? And of course, it’s always great to share how well your work performed with users and for the client’s business if you can get a hold of the actual feedback and data.

I hear time and time again from freelance and agency designers that they’re not sure of how to make the jump to in-house UX teams. It isn’t easy, but it’s doable — so don’t get discouraged! It just takes some additional effort to show your prospective hiring manager and team some of the process and thinking you might not typically feature in your portfolio. And if you do get the opportunity to move in-house, it’s a great career pivot for those that want to work closely with cross-functional product and engineering teams to build and iterate on products. So the question that remains is, do you like running sprints, or are you more of a marathoner?

And…if you’re interested in learning more about how we work at Thumbtack or want to share your own story of making the jump to an in-house UX team, you can find me at jsassoon@thumbtack.com. Oh, and we’re hiring!