Startup jumpstart

Project: Creation of startup-focused service offering

Role: Assoc. Director of Design, project champion
What that means I really did: Conceived of the model, advocated for it among leadership, evangelized on its behalf among staff; wrote strategic briefs and established OKRs necessary to execute on it; assembled a team of discipline experts to develop their respective areas; partnered with other members of leadership to validate the service model in the context of our industry and market conditions.

DockYard: Summer Lamson (Chief Services Officer), Samantha Gonzalez (Associate Director of Strategy), Seiji Hennelly (Director of Business Development and Sales Engineering), Estelle DeBlois (Director of Engineering), Leigh Brock (Director of Client Partnerships), Amy Dickson (Director of Marketing and Communications)

DockYard is a digital product consultancy that mostly works with growth-stage companies who’ve achieved a market fit and need help scaling to serve their expanding audience. But DockYard often failed to win startup projects with promising companies due to their budget and time constraints.

As design director, I spearheaded an effort to close that gap by offering early-stage startups a quicker path to launch. We call it “Rapid MVP,” and it relies on a standard set of tools optimized for quickly launching a client’s initial product release.

By leveraging our in-house component library, named StationUI, and a set of engineering and team process defaults, the path to a working product requires a fraction of the time it would take to build from scratch. DockYard staffs Rapid MVP projects with a small team — including strategy, design, UXD, and Elixir engineering (as needed) — designed to move quickly to ship a client’s minimum viable product, and start generating actionable insights from real users right away. 

Key to the success of this service offering was interviewing a series of startup founders and advisors, who were generous with their time and their advice. Roy Rodenstein, Martina Hahn, Susan Liao, and Albert Lee all had an enormous impact on our understanding of the challenges early-stage companies face, how diverse founders’ backgrounds and motivations can be, and what needs they are pressured to meet. We revised our approach with their insights and our gratitude. 

The first cohort of Rapid MVP client partnerships are poised to begin in mid-2024.