The Agency / Client Problem
A tale of mis-aligned incentives.
Published:
Dec 2, 2024
You always wanna dream big at an agency, which doesn’t necessarily align with what the actual business needs or is capable of executing
Agencies, in my experience can tend to get too far out ahead of their clients. The wider this gap, the more of a leap it is for the client to catch up. What they often need is to be taken along for the ride in a more incremental way. Don’t wait till the end of the project to start implementing things. Do it in chunks as you go along, and see how the changes go down. Are they integrated well, or rejected by the host body? Keeping tabs on how this is going will inevitably change the course of the future work.
The reality of being in-house is that you can’t focus 100% on design. There are other priorities, sprint planning, OKRs, never enough time to focus on design refinement, limited dev resources etc.
Meanwhile at the agency, their job and sole reason for existing is to focus 100% on design and imagine a perfect world where design reigns supreme. Can there be an agency that recognizes this divergence and tries to work with it? Absolutely — I’m not saying all agencies are blind to this problem, but it’s a common one, and one that exists to some degree in all agency ↔ in house relationships IMO
Ex: Branding
Branding agencies always show off perfectly-curated case studies with aspirational graphics that imagine good designers touching every aspect of the company output from top to bottom. What happens when these branding projects come into contact with reality? They inevitably get watered down, misinterpreted in thousands of tiny ways, and ultimately become a hollowed-out version of their original intent.
Conclusion
What am I arguing for here? What do I think needs to change? Nothing really. I’m not trying to chastise anyone for their transgressions. I think both parties almost always enter into engagements with the best of intentions. I simply put forward this idea for consideration. If you’re in an agency, maybe being aware of this dynamic will lead you to make different decisions along the way, or ask more / better questions to your client. If you’re hiring an agency, maybe you’ll be able to better manage the relationship and navigate it towards an outcome that will serve you better.