Three kinds of company will answer your brief in London, and they behave very differently once the contract is signed.
- —An agency sells campaigns and pages. Judged on how it looks and how it launches.
- —A development shop sells hands. Judged on tickets closed against a specification you wrote.
- —A product studio sells outcomes. Judged on whether the thing works in the hands of the people it was built for.
Signs you need a studio, not a specification
If you can hand over a complete specification and be confident it is right, hire hands and manage them well. If the honest answer is that you know the problem but not the solution, a fixed specification will lock in the first guess. A studio expects the shape to change between discovery and release, and prices that reality rather than pretending it away.
What good looks like week to week
- —Something working in front of real users inside the first month, however small.
- —One senior person accountable, in the room, for the whole engagement.
- —Decisions written down where you can find them in a year.
- —A release you could stop after and still be better off than before.
The test of a studio is whether the first release could stand alone if the budget stopped.
We run as a digital product studio in Mayfair: strategy, design, engineering and the film work in one building, with the same team through to launch.