Burst capacity - flexible, core team augmentation
The head of design in an international ecommerce business was dealing with rapid growth and demand for services as a result of the Pandemic. Her major issue was a surge in requests from product and commerce teams for design services, without head-count and a clear strategy to understand what the requirements would be in the long-term.
Research
Together we shared our client and market research with her and she brought us through the current state structure and what was planned for permanent headcount in the next 12 months.
Need
What became clear during this process was that in addition to building a small contractor team dedicated to UI and product design, the business would need intermittent support in UX writing and strategy. Also, some of the promised head count was now in place.
Process
We were able to deliver the small contractor team, fully outsourced to us, and billed as a joblot of day rates per month to the client. From our panel we sourced two talented writers with the neccessary human-centred design knowledge to work with them on a flexible basis. They were only engaged when copy was required and as they had a bank of their own clients to begin with this worked for all parties.
Outcome
Over the course of the last year and counting we have seen our contract team convert to permanent members of staff as the function and demand for services became more predicatbale. And the client still uses our wrtiers on demand, as and when copy is needed.