Three things I changed about the studio's process

Three quiet operational changes from the last six months that are worth writing down. None of them are clever. All of them have produced more useful output per week than the year of process tweaking before them.

The kick-off meeting is now two meetings, two weeks apart.

Most studios run the kick-off as a single ninety-minute call. The client says what they want. The studio asks questions. Everyone leaves with the wrong impression of the brief.

Two meetings, two weeks apart, is a substantial improvement. The first call is a listening session: the client talks, the studio takes notes, almost nothing is decided. The studio writes a two-page brief in the intervening fortnight. The second call is a brief review: the studio reads the brief back to the client, the client corrects it, and the project starts on the corrected version. The cost is a fortnight of calendar time. The saving is several weeks of redo work later, when the original brief turns out to have been wrong.

The first deliverable is a written document, not a Figma file.

The single biggest source of confusion in client work is the gap between what the studio meant when it produced a wireframe and what the client thought it meant when they looked at it. A Figma file looks decisive. A document is more obviously a draft. Asking the client to react to a written outline of the project before any design happens makes the design conversation that follows substantially clearer.

The document is short. Two to four pages. It says what the project will do, who it is for, what the design will and will not include, and what the studio thinks the principal decisions are. The client marks it up. The mark-ups are the thing the studio designs against.

Friday afternoons are blocked off.

Not for client work. Not for new business. Not for anything urgent. The block is for whatever the studio thinks is most important to its long-term shape that nobody else is asking for. Some Fridays it is writing here. Some Fridays it is reviewing recent work. Some Fridays it is reading something that does not have a current project to apply it to.

This was the change I was most reluctant to make. It felt indulgent. It has, six months in, been the single highest-leverage hour in the week.

The pattern across all three: the change in each case was to give the work more time, not less. Studios that want to produce stronger work tend to think first about pace, second about people, third about tools. I think the order should be reversed.

The Friday-afternoon block is, in spirit, borrowed from 37signals’ Shape Up methodology and Cal Newport’s deep-work argument. The two-meeting kick-off is closer to the Win Without Pitching listening-then-prescribing model. Neither is original. Both are quietly transformative once the studio commits to them.