How to improve your relationship with your digital agency

Key points:

• All agency engagement needs to be tied to output.
• Create a ‘plan on a page’ to keep your agency accountable.
• Time is money; don’t waste it – ever.

As someone who subscribes to the concept of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ when briefing digital agencies, I’ve spent what feels like a lifetime refining how I engage with agencies to better maximise the outputs I need while fostering a sense of partnership and accountability with the agency and their staff.

A bad Digital Product Leader will threaten, micromanage and rush their engagements to get what they need. This often leads to poor outputs and the start of an unpleasant cycle involving shouting, disputes and culture of ‘deliver or die’ on the agency side.

A good Digital Product Leader will set clear expectations, communicate with precision and provide concise and detailed briefs to an agency to ensure that every minute spent on their project, is considered and pointed at delivering on outcomes. Your agency needs to understand your commercial context and why you’re seeking their expertise.

Here are the key aspects of your engagement I suggest you audit and look to improve upon to become ‘outputs focused’ and re-build a (perhaps) damaged agency relationship.

Focus on the digital agency deliverables, not hours.

Where possible, avoid the temptation of ‘retained agency hours’. While cost-effective occasionally, in the early stages of agency engagement it’s best for all parties to be kept accountable to deliverables – not hours – in order to showcase value and ability to execute. While deliverables are likely tied back to hours (which is fine), agreeing to a monthly retained set of hours without exact deliverables is a quick way to overspend budget and create a laissez-faire style arrangement of showcasing value.

These arrangements are often made so as to ensure ‘bespoke’ or ‘on-demand’ client-side requests can be catered to; instead, as a good digital product leader – try to plan more thoroughly to avoid these last-minute requests and in-turn negate retained hours for anything other than core project work. You’re only as good as your process.

Create a ‘plan on a page’ for every deliverable you brief

While the art of writing a brief is a blog post unto itself, at a bare minimum you should look to create a ‘plan on a page’ that facilitates a quick snapshot of what you need your agency to assist with.

This includes valuable aspects such as setting the commercial context, outlining business objectives, previous product learnings and the outcomes you are looking to achieve via the engagement.

The way I see it, no matter who you are meeting with (be it an Account Manager, Developer, Designer or Strategy Consultant) – if you can’t hand over a single A4 page that clearly brings them up to speed in under three minutes of reading time – you’ve failed as a Digital Product Leader.

Verbally briefing agencies can occasionally work, though a plan on a page is the key deliverable at hand; allowing your agency to refine their later response and focus on intentional listening, not note taking of key facts you verbalise in a meeting or kick-off session.

Avoid tedious reporting requests

It’s all too easy to burden your digital agency to become your ‘reporting agency’. This could be reporting on website metrics, campaign stats or even incremental uplift from growth hacking experiments. As a Digital Product Leader, your aim should be to leverage the data your agency provides in a self-serve and easy to automate way.

Paying people to present reports, prepare reports or make sense of reports is often a lazy person game; instead, look to redirect some upfront energy into asking your agency to help you self-serve and ingest data into platforms like Tableu.

This initial request will cost upfront, but pay dividends down the track – be it in saving money, saving time or empowering your organisation to maintain it’s own data and reporting capability. At Berlan, one of the core pillars we preach of any successful engagement is the concept of Proof; learning what works well and doing more of it.

Define a clear meeting structure

While some agencies bill you for your meetings, others do not. Either way, as a good Digital Product Leader, you are likely astutely aware that meetings are the 21st century’s plague. They waste time, they multiply and they’re costly.

Rectify the ‘meeting culture’ with agencies by setting incredible examples as a Digital Product Leader. Aim to always send detailed agendas that include; topics, outcomes desired, and suggested pre-reading prior to an in-person discussion. Ask that your agency do the same in return and hold everyone to high standards.

As a side note, ‘Parkinson’s Law’ explores the concept that we as humans tend to fill the time we have available to achieve a task. This is particularly true of meetings; if we have 60 minutes, we use it all. If you wish to keep your team and agency accountable and fast paced – set meetings with abstract run times such as 23 minutes.

Restrict digital agency business development discussions

Avoid business development meetings that blend with weekly work in progress updates. While agency Account Managers and Producers are likely KPI’d on generating new business (which is fine), be clear that you want these discussions held separately to any project discussions or deliverable updates.

This keeps all agency attendees at meetings focused on the deliverables at hand and acutely aware that business development (no matter how useful or related) should be discussed separately, so as not to waste the time of billable resources likely in attendance.

Do you manage a digital team and agency relationship? Contact us to learn more about how we can help you benchmark your agency engagement and give you tangible actions to increase Digital Product performance.

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