London has no shortage of studios who can produce a beautiful wall of wireframes. Fewer can tell you which of those frames earns money, which is decoration, and which will be deleted after the first fortnight of real use. That distinction is the whole job.
1. Ask what the first release proves
A first release is an experiment with a bill attached. It should prove one thing: that people complete the journey, that the integration holds, that the operation can run it. If nobody in the pitch can state the proposition in a sentence, the scope is a wish list.
2. Watch how they handle the user flows
Good product designers argue with you about the flow and agree quickly about the visual. When we sketch user flows for a booking or intake journey, the interesting frames are the failure paths: the person who abandons, the record that arrives incomplete, the staff member cleaning it up on Monday.
- —Does the pitch show the unhappy path, or only the demo path?
- —Who owns the content that fills these screens, and does it exist yet?
- —What happens to the work already in flight on launch day?
- —How will we know in month two whether this worked?
Any studio can show you the journey that goes right. Ask to see the one that goes wrong.
3. Insist on a baseline before you start
If there is no baseline, there is no result, only a story told afterwards. We agree the measurement period, the conversion events and the attribution method before a line of code is written, and we record the evidence behind any figure we later publish. It is slower to set up and much harder to argue with.
A sensible way to start
Start on one journey rather than a platform. One page, one story, one follow-up, measured against a baseline, is a far better test of a studio than a six-month programme you cannot cancel.