Common issues with resourcing at digital agencies that impede your product growth

A traditional digital agency is all about its people.

And make no mistake, almost every digital agency I have interacted with has had some standout talent.

Usually it starts with the CEO/founder/owner though I have met passionate, dedicated and capable people at all stages of the digital agency. Experienced analysists, creative UX designers, visual designers with ideas and colours that blow you away for their originality and cleverness.

People invest in people and digital agencies are no different. It might seem a truism, though a digital agency with a great team is likely a great agency.

I really do not like to say that this is where the good news ends, though often it is.

Because having a great team in place does not unfortunately solve three of the confines inherent to all digital agencies:

1. They specialise in a certain language, tech stack, CMS etc and that is the limit.
2. The breadth of talent is limited by the number of people within the team. By virtue of being small/medium businesses, digital agencies tend not to have dedicated specialists: think solution architecture, security, research etc.
3. They are always, always stretched for resource. There are never enough people to get through all the work that is being asked for.

Let us unpack these three.

Limited by technology

Digital agencies are typically invested in a certain language or tech stack.

Digital agencies are typically wedded to a given CMS technology that they promote and sell. (And let me tell you, half of a digital agency’s life is defending and promoting their chosen CMS solution!)

Now, specialisation can be a good thing.

Though equally, it can be a limiting thing.

Firstly, where the digital agency’s technology is unsuitable for the task at hand.

Secondly, where the digital agency cannot execute in another technology required by the client.

On face value, this might seem straight forward: a clear thing to demarcate.  

Except that often the arbiter of where to draw the line is the digital agency itself. And this is the issue:

1. No digital agency wants to lose potential revenue.
2. No digital agency wants its client talking to alternative, more suitable digital agencies.
3. Every agency believes (rightly or wrongly) that their technologies are suitable for about pretty much everything, however lateral this interpretation (or application).

So in summary, digital agencies are (or should be) boxed into what they can do and what they can’t do.

Lacking specialisation

I am going to be quite general here because there exists such a plethora of digital agencies out there: small agencies building small things and sophisticated and larger agencies building more complex applications and websites.

And everything in-between from digital marketing agencies, SEO shops, specialised UX agencies and who knows what.

Each of these agencies have an ideal project and an ideal client.

Something these agencies can pull-off whilst asleep.

Though these agencies face plenty of stuff they cannot pull off in their sleep.

Complex work greater than the normal level of complexity they face.

Different work than they typically deal with.

Essentially, work that is out of their comfort zone.

Of course, no business can claim to always have all the resource, capability, and specialisation it needs and that is why we have suppliers, agencies, and consultants.

The issue is that digital agencies do not think about it like that:

• A digital agency does not know what it does not know. This is a truism, though the guardian of a project within a digital agency is the Digital Producer and they are very rarely enabled to see risks in capability and call them out.
  
• When it comes to engineering, engineers will often fail to identify risk because they do not see risk and if they do, they stonewall.
  
• Digital agencies cannot afford and do not know of the resources they need. Worse, they feel that their clients would demand that the agency stumped up the bill for (usually for work demanded retrospectively after things have blown up) the specialisation required.
  
• The issues manifest in so two key ways:
  
• Agencies pretending to do things they do not. Like a web dev shop pretending to do social media where – with all due respect – the client is getting screwed over.
  
• Or where things blow up and the agency is so clearly in over their head. Websites that cannot meet their load, data exposures, appalling UX. You name it.

Either way, agencies do not have a proactive process – or even thought process – to engage specialists: a combination of how they resource themselves and the inherent thinking within these agencies.

Not enough resource

Look, as someone that ran a medium-sized and successful agency for over a decade, I know how tough it is. And as crucial as I might come across, I am genuinely not critical of agencies, their people, or their leaders.

It is a tough gig. Sexy at times, though tough.

Slim margins, demanding clients, inherently poor processes that leave little wriggle-room for change and genuine, sustainable improvement.

I maintain that the overall model digital agency is broken compared to the business and operational models of so many other business models.

Nobody in agency – or client land – disputes that agency gasp for resource.

Plenty of people are always upfront to take on new business though the tail is not long enough.

It never is.

Too much work. Too many blow-outs. Too many new estimates to get through. Too many new projects to cover for the older, profit-gone work.

And this means three distinct things for clients:

1. A client can never, ever expect a dedicated team. People jump in and out. Promises made are not promises kept.
   
   Agencies do not have slack to free up. What they are freeing up when they earnestly take on your new job is someone else’s resource.
   
   You might roughly have the same people on your project – and pray you keep the same development resource – though even if you do, they are working on many, many projects.
   
   This reduces quality, throughput, focus.
   
   
2. Which means delays. Inevitable delays.
   
   Unless you have a hard-deadline or something contractually, you are facing delay.
   
   This is not just because of the fluid nature of digital agency resourcing. It also speaks to the blowouts traditional (waterfall) projects face.
   
   Though couple them both and kaboom. There is your delay.
   
   
3. Your digital agency cannot scale which means you cannot scale.
   
   And this is a growing issue.
   
   Pre-Covid and after, we are facing an Armageddon of demand for digital. And clients want to scale to meet demand.
   
   Even if digital agencies have the cashflow and profitability to do so, scaling dynamically like clients now demand is just not a thing.
   
   It requires a commitment many clients will not agree to and it requires time to resource.
   
   Trust me. I have been in many a difficult meeting where unaware of the commercial/client realities demanding scale, I have been unable or unwilling to do this: or worse, unaware of why they wanted it.

So where does this leave us?

In conceiving and planning the Product Agency, we really thought hard about this challenge.

We thought hard about many challenges.

Because even if you have 80 people working in an agency, this by no-means solves these issues and it opens a bunch more.

I have outlined the downsides of the resourcing challenges for agencies in this blog, though there are upsides as well.

You know the team. They know you. Loyalties can grow. Knowledge can grow.

The more you work together, the easier it hopefully gets.

We have taken a different approach to traditional digital agencies however when it comes to resourcing.

Knowing the pros and cons.

1. We borrow significantly from the gig economy.
   
   Designers, developers, and everyone else with capacity to produce.
   
   This gives us an endless breadth of specialisation across an endless number of technologies.
   
   We can hire people with whatever experience, whenever we need them. For a day, a week, whatever.
   
   Yes, people in the gig economy have potentially limited capacity though no more than you are likely to receive from an agency.
   
   
2. We can double down on these specialisations.
   
   Experience tells us when we need a gun in security. Or database optimisation. Or research.
   
   We dial them up. And then dial them down.
   
   We are not precious. We need the specialisation, the process identifies this (well, hopefully!) and we hire it in.
   
   
3. But wow: when it comes to scale, this is where the model comes in its own.
   
   We build a dedicated team and we only dedicate those people to that team. We scale up, not down (unless we need to).

Which is not to say our model does not have it challenges

Traditional digital agencies with full-time staff benefit from some clear incumbent benefits.

They work under one roof, they know each other, they have worked together.

We cannot claim that yet, or at not least.

By providing strong Product Management leadership, we believe we can mitigate some of this.

Though digital agencies often have an X factor in their team, and we might not be able to articulate that as early on (if at all).

We would argue that people in the gig economy are focused on ensuring that the 20 hours of work they do a week for us are the best 20 hours they do: because this is the most scrutinised 20 hours of their week: we estimate their output, we see their output.

Though the X factor?

We believe we can bring that through strong product leadership and by rigorous recruitment.

Though that is a challenge and there will be plenty of hiccups.

Positively, the Process we adopt means positivity and throughput should be identified quickly and the opposite too.

Scale?

Well, this we can do. We are recruiting some staggering talent.

We have some amazing people on tap.

And more and more people on tap.

We can scale.

With a breadth of technology understanding. With specialisations that traditional digital agencies cannot or will not engage.

And scale that has no roof.

We are not arguing that our approach does not have road bumps.

Though we believe we are working from a better base and with a view to much better delivery and success.

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