Lately I’ve thought about the prospective client who used to come in the door, look around, see a bunch of qualitative research, and ask for quantitative research, instead. Doing so is kind of the equivalent of walking into a hardware store and asking for a finished house. Like, yes, that’s the point, but we don’t sell houses. We sell the tools to build them. If you want a finished house, there are other places for you to go, instead.

Yes, there is demand for finished houses. Of course there is. But there is also demand for architects, no? Someone’s gotta figure out what to do and how to do it.

I don’t think recent technological developments will change this. You need to know what to write in your prompt. No automation will ever change that for you.

I said “used to” in that first sentence. What happened to them? We pause conversations with those who don’t understand our work. After all, you’re in a hardware store. We sell hardware here. If we didn’t think it had value, we wouldn’t be selling it.

We’ve got a fun little announcement today: we’re going to be adding a new component to the Draft Method. This will matter a lot if you’re an active client, a little if you’re on the wait list, and it might be of some academic interest if you follow our work.

Since our repositioning, we’ve had the good fortune to work with a handful of really smart clients who know what they’re doing and want help doing it. In doing so, we’ve found a bunch of patterns that might be useful to other independent software businesses who happen to work with us. So we’ve taken our full client portfolio, encompassing our whole client history dating back to 2012, and synthesized some ideas about how teams work and what they can do better.

This is a long time coming, and it can only happen when you’ve worked with as many clients as we have. (Over 100 as of press time!) We’re especially curious about:

• Layers of approval
• Points of leveraged power
• Executional velocity
• Normalized deviance
• Internal biases
• Scaling issues
• Newcomer training

This is because:

• We already know how to design
• Calling customers is useless if you don’t do something about it
• We’re here to get impact, and impact comes from change management
• We’re a consultancy

And so we decided to do something about it.

In addition to our existing research methods, we’ll be putting together assessments of our longer-term clients on a yearly basis. That means if you’ve worked with us for longer than a year, you’ll get one within the next quarter. If you’re fresh to our work, you’ll get one once we’ve been together for a year.

This is for two reasons. First, it takes a year to assess a company’s internal processes well enough to make load-bearing pronouncements about them. And more importantly, it takes that long to get the trust of the team to say some pointy things.

Our work will involve:

• Business comparisons. How large are they compared to other businesses in their industry? What does their org chart look like? What opportunities & weaknesses exist in their sector?
• Operational heuristics. What is the business’s executional velocity? How many layers of approval are required to ship work? How do meetings proceed?
• Internal diagnostics. What specific things will we do to improve?

And so we’re excited to start benchmarking. We think our clients still have a lot of opportunity to explore!