Aarni's Blog

Most designers offer their services through short-term projects, which means that the client-designer relationship is often temporary. What are the other types of designer-client relationships and how are they best managed?

The relationship quadrants

Two aspects are important when characterizing client-designer relationships:

1) The scope of the service

2) The role of the designer in the client's process

The scope of the service can be either a project or an ongoing process. In both cases, the role of the designer can be either assistive or participative. In order to compare the two types of scope and the two alternative roles, we can visualize a matrix with four relationship types (see diagram, below).

Each type has different goals, opportunities, risks, and competitive strategies associated with it. Here is a short characterization of the four relationship types:

A) An assistive role in a project – The Project Supplier

• Driver: Client’s need to get a solution to a single, well defined problem.
• Duration: Short-term agreements.
• Designer's goal: To be awarded the supplier’s contract.
• Competitive factors: Price or service performance.
• Critical success factor: Price-quality ratio.
• Designer should know: Decision-makers and their criteria for providers; customers’ needs; ways to improve your own productivity

A project can be the start of a successful designer-client relationship. However, many clients feel that they have to tender each project, which makes this kind of relationship potentially transitory.

B) An assistive role in an ongoing process – The Outsourced Process Provider

• Driver: Client's determination to focus on core business.
• Duration: Long-term, ongoing service.
• Designer's goal: To allow the client to focus on their core business.
• Competitive factors: Provision of cost-effective services.
• Critical success factor: Integration into the client’s processes.
• Designer should know: The right service scope and the client’s own cost for providing the same service level.

It is naturally good business practice for a client to focus on their core business. Therefore, many companies want to outsource processes that they consider complementary. This provides a design company with the opportunity to build a long-lasting relationship with the client. Clients are very cost-conscious in outsourcing deals, so the designer must be able to provide a high-quality service cost-effectively.

C) A participative role in a project - The Consultant

• Driver: A strategically important issue that requires a solution.
• Duration: An ongoing relationship with recurrent projects.
• Designer’s goal: To create and maintain a trusted relationship.
• Competitive factors: Strategic thinking; understanding the client-s business.
• Critical success factor: Ability to improve the client’s competitive position.
• Designer should know: The client’s strategy.

The difference between a type-A relationship and a Type-C one is that, in the latter, the designer contributes more directly to the competitiveness of the client. The designer can be, for example, taking part in a new product or process design that improves the client's core business. A designer is a trusted advisor, even though the relationship is formed around projects.

D) A participative role in a process – The Strategic Partner

• Driver: New business value that can be derived from working together.
• Duration: Long-term relationships.
• Designer’s goal: Shared business goals with the client.
• Competitive factors: Ability to provide unique value to the client.
• Critical success factor: Partnership-management competence.
• Designer should know: Strategic fit with the clients is key; risks related to working together.

This relationship type is the most mature and the most demanding. It is similar to a joint venture, where the client and designer share a vision and a strategy. They also share the business risk to a certain extent. David Lewis certainly had a strategic relationship with Bang & Olufsen. The work of Lewis’s company played a crucial role in B&O's success.

Which relationships to pursue?

All of the four designer-client relationship types have their pros and cons. Some designers are perfectly happy taking on projects that have a limited life span. Some strive to build long-term relationships. Whichever your strategy, it’s advisable not to rely on one single relationship model. By developing a range of models, your company increases its chances of success in a business world where uncertainty has become the norm.

Service designers rightly emphasize how service development should start from the customers, and their needs and motivations. Service is collaboration between the customer and the provider. It is, therefore, important to make sure that the provider has the will and means to deliver the service as planned. To accomplish this, service design should integrate with business design.

As a management consultant I've been involved in dozens of service-development projects. In some cases I've been able to help my client for years, starting from the first ideas, until the service is in its second or third development cycle. A couple of years ago I devised a framework for communicating the service-development life cycle. It is suitable for both B2B and B2C services, even though I've mainly used it in business-to-business cases.

The framework has two halves. The upper half denotes the customer's and the lower the company's viewpoint (see the illustration).

1. Needs and strategies

The first phase is related to understanding what the customers want to achieve. The purpose of a service is to make customers perform better in their everyday tasks. When you know the outcome that the customer wants — for example, less time used, fewer errors and less waste — you can start making strategic choices on the needs you want to satisfy. A service strategy also defines what means you want to use to achieve your goals.

A software company I know had identified the need to improve construction-site management. It started off with scheduling and production control. It found out that the best way to do that was to make a virtual model of the construction. That opened the doors to other applications later on.

2. Service concept and business model

After you have decided on your strategy, you can create a concept-level plan of the service. The concept defines what the benefits of using your service will be, and what the service does. In other words, you'll have to look at the service through your customers’ eyes and understand what kind of service helps them do their work better. 

Another thing to consider is the maturity of the customer in relation to what you can offer. For example, the construction management software firm realized that it had to offer both software and people to operate the software for the first customers.

During the concept phase you can already start creating a buzz around the service; do test marketing, and perhaps make some service prototypes. Customer relationship building starts at this stage. On your company's side you'll have to define the business model that makes offering the service feasible. A business model includes the revenue and cost logic of the service.

3. Service design and operational model

The third phase focuses on the delivery of service. You will design the service and create the business platform for delivering it. This is the phase where you prototype, test, and launch your service. You will need the right people, systematized processes, and technical solutions to make the service delivery cost-efficient. Getting the right kind of customers and exceeding their expectations is the best marketing you can do.

4. Relationship value and improvement

The fourth phase is all about establishing the service as a first choice of existing and new customers. They will get more value from your service than anywhere else. You'll strengthen the customer relationships through learning and cooperation. You must systematize the service to a point where you can scale it up for an enlarged customer base or for new markets. 

The model I have outlined is adaptive and dynamic. You must and you will go back to adjust your earlier assumptions. Improving the outcomes and making your processes more efficient guarantee that your business  grows profitably in the years to come.

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, was originally a very shy guy. In his book iWoz he writes, “Most inventors and engineer I’ve met are like me–they’re shy and live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists.”

Steve writes that, “artist work best alone–best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee.” He does not believe that anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by a committee. Why? Because the committee would never agree on it.

Steve’s thoughts are perhaps against the mainstream that emphasizes teamwork and “innovation processes”.  Steve promotes the idea of an engineer who thinks how to create the best possible end result with the fewest number of components. He says, however, that in his entire life he has only seen about twenty engineers who really exemplify that artistic perfection.

Steve gives his advice to “that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist”. The advice is: work alone. He says that if you’re a young inventor who wants to change the world, a corporate environment is the wrong place for you.

“You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team. That means that you’re probably going to have to do what I did. Do your projects as moonlighting, with limited money and limited resources. But man, it’ll be worth it in the end.”

The book on amazon.com: iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It