When I decided to start a design studio, I thought the hardest part would be finding clients. Or maybe setting up the company. Or maybe even learning how to sell myself. All of that turned out to be challenging, sure, but none of it compares to the real, ongoing difficulty: building a process that actually scales.
Design studios aren’t software startups.
You can’t just copy paste a playbook and assume it will work for everyone. Every project is different. Every client comes with their own quirks, their own level of maturity, their own version of “urgent.” What works beautifully for one engagement completely collapses under the weight of the next.
And so the real puzzle isn’t how to do good design work. Most of us already know how to do that. The puzzle is: how do you create a methodology that delivers consistently high quality, no matter the client, no matter the context, without burning out your team or reinventing the wheel every single time?
And here’s the kicker: you don’t just need a process that works, you need one that both scales and still feels human. Too rigid, and you kill creativity. Too loose, and you’re trapped in chaos, never knowing how long something will take or whether it will hit the mark. This is the tension I live with daily.
Some days, I dream of the “perfect methodology,” a clean system that makes every client feel guided and every designer feel supported. But the reality is more like jazz than classical music: we’re improvising around a shared structure, not following a sheet of notes.
That’s what makes it so hard, and so exciting. The truth is, I don’t have the answer yet. A mentor once told me that there is no such answer, because a perfectly scalable process doesn’t exist. Maybe he’s right. I’ll let you know if I ever figure something out.
