When your product team is flat out, good ideas get stuck. The skills are there, but the spare hours are not.
One of the most common reasons companies come to us has nothing to do with a shortage of talent. It’s that the talent they have is already flat out. You might have multiple good ideas sitting there, waiting, and no one’s free to push them forward.
You probably know the feeling. Maybe you’re a growing company that keeps design in-house but needs a partner for the overflow. Maybe you’re racing to get a product in front of investors. Maybe you’re an established team with a deadline that won’t move and a plate that’s already full.
Different situations, same problem: too much to do, not enough resource and the usual fixes don’t quite fit. Hiring is too slow and too permanent for a one-off spike. Handing the whole thing to an agency means losing control of how your team works and getting back something built their way, not yours.
This is one of the areas we excel at – giving you high-quality, plug-in support to get your projects moving.
Here’s what it looks like in practice…
Two ideas and six weeks to make them manufacturable
That’s roughly where one well-known consumer brand found themselves earlier this year.
Their own designers had been considering a couple of good ideas, which they’d put forward business cases for. To their surprise, the company agreed to go ahead with both but set tight deadlines! Their in-house design team is one of the best around, but they were already full. Their design lead knew our work, trusted it, and pushed for us.
Evaluating a couple of potential design partners, they asked us which project we could deliver from idea to a finished, manufacturable design in about six weeks.
We could do both.
First, we got to know the people who’d use the products. Some rapid field research, meant that by week 2 we had an understanding of how it would be used in practice, and a clear view of what the design had to get right before anything was made.
Then we went fast. Prototypes printed overnight, tested when we got back to the workshop in the morning, changes made the same day and printed again. We ran more than ten rounds in the space of a few weeks, each one a step closer to something that felt right to use.
We didn’t ask them to change how they work. We used their components and CAD, reported in to their team the way any designers would internally, with lots of work-in-progress updates and kept the project moving without adding to anyone’s plate.
And because we understand manufacturing, when the fully developed design reached their production partner, it went through with no major changes. It’s heading into tooling now.
A turnaround like that isn’t magic, and it isn’t right for every project. It worked because a few things were true: someone inside the business already owned the idea and had made the case for it, the brief was clear enough to act on, and decisions came back the same day rather than sitting in a queue. Give us that, and we can move very fast.
This is what good product design support looks like
Your team carries on with the work they’ve already got. We take on the project there’s no room for, work collaboratively with the people you already have, and hand back something that’s ready to build. No long onboarding, no reinventing how you work.
It’s a deliberate way of working, not a watered-down version of a bigger engagement. We’ve shaped it to work when you have a clear brief, a real deadline, and an in-house team that’s good but full. Then it’s the fastest, lowest-friction way you can confidently deliver extra projects without the cost and commitment of a permanent hire.
And when the problem is bigger than a brief
Plug-in delivery of a clear brief is a great way to work with us. But some of the most valuable work we do starts further upstream, before there’s even a brief at all.
When a leadership team is facing more complex and ambiguous decisions, such as a new product direction, a category to move into, redefining your brand positioning, we help turn that ambiguity into a clear, risk-managed direction everyone can commit to. It’s deeper and ultimately more powerful, because it shapes what gets built in the first place.
You may not be driving that decision. But if it is happening at an even more senior level, it’s worth knowing the same partner can handle both: the delivery you need now, and the strategic thinking your leadership might need next.
Tell us what you’re up against
Send us the project outline and the deadline you’re working to, and we’ll tell you within a few days whether we can do it.
Still figuring out what needs doing? A short call to scope out what’s realistic works just as well.
