I recently heard the term “Super IC”, used to describe a product designer that remains an “individual contributor” or “hands-on” whilst also working at an increasingly senior level. Example job titles include Principal Product Designer or Distinguished Product Designer.

If you’re not at this level yet but would like to start working towards it, one way is to start thinking about dual tracks of work in your projects. I want to give an example of what dual track work looks like so you can apply it to your work and take ownership of levelling-up your experience and position.

In my current project we’re designing a new area to the platform. In doing so our primary objective is to launch V1. As a designer the work is essentially UX and UI design work across pages and user actions. To achieve this I need to use all the tools in my kit, user flow diagrams, research, workshops to figure out problems, prototyping and documenting designs. All the good stuff. You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s enough work because it is. However, let’s say we want to go beyond the near-term objective.

Let’s call the work that I’ve just described our “Execution track” — we’re designing the actual thing and working with engineers to make it real. Now let’s introduce a second track, the “Strategic track”.

In many organisations either the PM or a design manager is thinking about this strategic track. Whilst the IC designer is heads-down on the execution track, people closer to the strategic work figure out strategy and then return to the IC designer with the next phase of the project, all written up with clear direction and requirements. As a designer who’s working their way up, I encourage you to lead this strategic track or, if it’s already happening, get involved.

If the Execution track is about what we’re making, then the Strategic track is about how we make it successful. This can get confusing because good UX in itself is a driver of success. But a well designed experience doesn’t necessarily mean it will be successful.

In the case of the strategic track in my project we’re concerned with questions like “How will we drive adoption?” “What can we do to ensure we get good engagement?” “What metrics matter?”. Answering these questions with design (and engineering) involved can be transformative.

As a designer leading this strategic track I am designing diagrams that describe the problems, I’m zooming out to other areas of the product to spot opportunities, I’m running ideation sessions, and I’m working more closely with the PM to get current data that we can use as a benchmark and to better understand the problems.

Your work here as a designer is not only an invaluable contribution you’ll also gain a greater sense of ownership of direction and vision. Today’s strategic work will eventually be tomorrow’s execution work, so you’ll also go into that next phase with a much clearer sense of the problem.

I don’t know what designers need to hear this but when I started presenting my work I sucked. I was almost debilitatingly anxious. Even today after presenting, I can do with a lie down afterwards. But here’s the thing, I knew it was part of the job of being a designer so I made a conscious effort to get better at it.

For five years or so for every meeting I literally wrote out a script for myself. Word for word I wrote down what I wanted to say and I practiced it many times over until it sounded natural and I no longer needed the notes, though I also used notes and sometimes re-wrote the notes based off the script in a much shorter form for reference.

This was the “wax-on, wax-off” stage of me developing the skill of presenting my work. I did that for a good 5 years for nearly every meeting, even when I was presenting only 10–15 mins. Fast forward to today and now I can get by with no prep and no notes.

If you ever observe someone who appears to be very capable at presenting then please do not write yourself off because you’re “not a natural”. I certainly was not. Make a habit of doing the extra work to prepare for each presentation and in 5-10 years time you’ll be able to present clearly and confidently with little effort.

N.B. I still suck a short-form video content, that’s a different skill entirely.

A punk mentality is a rare thing. [Linked In], more often than not, reveals how truly conformist many of us are.

Recently there’s been some hubbub about things like “heritage” and how there’s “a right way to do things”. I don’t know about everyone else but I didn’t get into design to do things how they’re meant to be done. I certainly didn’t set out to continue the status quo. It’s easily lost though, over a decade of working with clients, pushing against their aversions to risk, pulling them towards something more ambitious, emboldening them to say something real. That can really suck the life out of you and leave you a little more passive.

So what does it mean to be a non-conformist, to have a punk mentality? What might Punk look like as a set of values to adhere to...

1. Nonconformity

• Rejecting societal norms, expectations, and traditional rules.

• Valuing individuality over fitting in or adhering to mainstream trends.

2. DIY Ethos

• A strong belief in “do-it-yourself” approaches, whether in music, art, business, or life.

• Prioritising creativity, resourcefulness, and the ability to produce and create independently.

3. Rebellion Against Authority

• Questioning systems of power, such as governments, corporations, or social hierarchies.

• Refusing to accept rules or control imposed without reason or fairness.

4. Authenticity

• Valuing honesty, self-expression, and staying true to one’s principles.

• Rejecting superficiality or compromise for the sake of popularity or acceptance.

5. Empowerment

• Believing in one’s ability to create change, both personally and collectively.

• Encouraging grassroots action and mutual support within communities.

6. Embracing Imperfection

• Valuing rawness, imperfection, and honesty over polish and commercialism.

• Recognising beauty and strength in flaws and failures.

7. Inclusivity

• Challenging elitism or exclusionary practices within subcultures or broader society.

• Advocating for equity and fairness, often for marginalised groups.

8. Critique of Consumerism

• Resisting over-commercialisation, fast fashion, and material excess.

• Valuing sustainability, second-hand culture, and conscious consumption.

9. Resilience

• Refusing to back down in the face of adversity.

• Finding ways to thrive despite limited resources or systemic challenges.

In short, Punk is about rejecting passivity and unapologetically forging your own path. I think we could all benefit from doing a bit more of that. Or perhaps there’s no place for this in the world of work and I should get back in my box?

Here’s the biggest mistake we made trying to build Scoops, a B2B SaaS product...

TL;DR: We chose to bootstrap a product that was difficult to sell.

From the start I was adamant that we should bootstrap Scoops. We were in a period where funding was hard to secure, we were two first-time tech founders and we were keen to build and get something out there rather than sink a ton of time into pitching. We also knew that many Angels and VCs wanted to see traction first. So we figured let’s worry about traction and maybe we won’t ever need them.

Our personal situations meant that we had to build Scoops on the side of our individual freelance practices, we toyed about with ideas of combining forces to form an agency to get us going but decided that would be a ton of effort that wasn’t focused enough in the right direction. The point is, we were trying to bootstrap whilst maintaining our paying client work. Which is an important detail when considering the next issue.

Scoops was hard to sell. I’d probably go as far as to say ALL research tools are hard to sell. Research simply falls into that category of “nice to have” as opposed to “need”. And boy did we scratch our heads about how we could shift the perception of the tool from a want to a need. But no matter what bow you put on top of a research tool it will always be one step removed from the actual value (which is the action you take based on the research which leads to increase revenue etc.) Please please please, show me a tool that proves me wrong here. I genuinely want to see it.

What do I mean by ‘hard to sell’. We over estimated what our sales success rate would be. We got excited about every customer we started talking to, tailoring our decks to speak to their needs and pouring our energy into trying to secure a contract with them. We set a realistic target of 10 customers and set the pricing such that we would be able to afford to bring our developer on full time. We defined our ICP etc, etc.

We didn’t get far enough to report our actual sales success rate but the industry average for B2B SaaS is between 2–5%. So let’s take the optimistic 5% for some quick maths. If we need 10 customers at a rate of 5% we need to be in conversation with 200 companies—**Enter one of the 1000s of SaaS bros who has filled my inbox with spam over the last several months claiming they can get me 200 pre-qualified leads in 45 seconds.** Yawn. We simply didn’t have time to be juggling 200 leads with the hope of securing 10.

But success rate is only one side of the sales equation. The length of the sales cycle was something we also came up against. With our two most successful conversations we were entering months two and three and on to our third and fourth calls with them. On each call we were really putting our best foot forward and trying to get that sale. We got super positive signals but never truly got the green light. As I said before research is always perceived as a “nice to have”. And in a struggling economic climate it’s often the first thing that gets cut.

Based on our experience, and from other folks we spoke to in the research SaaS space, I estimate our sales cycle would have been between 6–12 months. With a need to speak to 200 companies across 6–12 months, our goal of securing our first 10 customers just to get us going seemed like a impossible equation.

This, we realised, is why funding is important. To buy yourselves a bubble of time to do all of this stuff without needing to juggle a whole other full-time job. You can get just one sale and you already have a full team working full time on it. That said, I still don’t like the idea of getting investment. Having a bunch of cash to play with wouldn’t have changed any of the above factors, we’d have likely been quite stressed about needing prove traction to investors and watching our pot of money go down and before we know it we’re back out pitching again.

But there’s another way I hear you scream. Product Led Growth! Ahh yes, I love it. One day I will do a full PLG startup but not with a research tool. Needless to say we couldn’t figure that our either. With PLG you make the product free to try, reduce the time to value, lower the price point so that a junior on the team can start a subscription without needing to get sign-off. Do all of that and ... crickets ... You need to market it. The Linked In influencers reckon founder-led marketing is the way here. Dunno about you but I didn’t fancy my chances as a Linked In guru. I tried (you might have seen).

I burned through my free trial of Sales Navigator trying to muster up a following of our target audience. I learned one thing. Most of our target audience were too busy working and showed very little activity on Linked In. Who knew people actually worked and didn’t just mindlessly scroll their feed all day. Perhaps we could have done some nifty growth-hack-y marketing to get traction on a PLG approach. But the numbers for PLG are different again. People expected VERY low costs. Let’s say £50 per month, which is honestly higher than what some people said. How many £50 subs do we need to get our dev on board? And how are we going to pay him to build and maintain the platform whilst we slowly climb to that figure? I won’t bore you with more maths. Needless to say, despite our best excel wizardry, we couldn’t see a clear path with PLG either.

So there you have it, an excruciatingly honest account of the biggest lesson I learned trying to make a B2B SaaS product. No need for tiny violins though, getting this lesson first-hand and truly sweating the details about how to figure it out means I get to shortcut this process next time around, and there will be several next times over the years to come.

I’ve recently been discussing the topic of defining a niche or specialism with a few other agency founders. After some healthy debate I still feel that positioning an agency towards a niche or specialism is the best way to go.

The main reason for this is increased competition. When a potential client is faced with many options they will look to see which one most aligns to either their industry or the solution they’re looking for. What underlies this buying behaviour is the perception that there is value in the deep knowledge that a specialised agency will have. That works for both an industry-based specialism (healthcare) or a craft-based specialism (3D motion graphics), even better if you’re both (digital strategy for arts and culture). If you’re a contractor you’ll know this best by the line “Must have experience in Fintech”, common on many recent job ads. It’s another way of saying, we don’t want to hire someone who will have to learn about Fintech, we want the reassurance that they can hit the ground running.

Even large, generalised consultancies understand the importance of specialism. McKinsey provide a large array of services for multiple industries. You could argue they’re generalist. But the structure of their website reveals the company is actually made up of many specialists sitting under the banner of a respected name. Structured under the taxonomy of industry sectors, they present content that demonstrates deep knowledge alongside the partners with expertise in that area. It’s an approach that works for them mostly due to their size. Pentagram have a similar model.

Hanno—a small, independent digital agency—focus entirely on the health and wellness space. In their useful playbook they give their take on this matter:

“We realised that trying to be a generalist agency was something of a fools errand. That's why we started to narrow down on a niche and subsequently decided to focus our time entirely on health and wellness projects.

The advantage of this is that it makes outbound marketing far more natural. Instead of sending out spammy messages to every startup in existence, we can focus our time on doing good networking with other people who are experts in the same Healthcare space.”

The problem with working in a niche or specialism is that it goes against the idea that being a generalist is good for creativity. What you learn from one industry can be applied to another and lead to breakthrough ways of doing things; a cross-pollination of thought. If you become too entrenched in a single mindset or industry there’s a chance you might lose the ability to ‘see things from the outside’. Ultimately, this external view point is why clients hire outside help, though this is not always reflected in their buying behaviour, as I stated above.

This presents a dichotomy. A battle between the head and the heart almost, which leaves me with a couple of questions as I seek to remedy the unease of the matter:

How can I continue to position my agency towards a niche whilst still maintaining the ability to see things from the outside?

Is it possible to maintain the creative benefits of being a generalist through secondary activities (e.g. reading), as opposed to primary activities (e.g. project work)?