Leadership · 2019 to now
Building a design practice inside a Big Four firm
A design studio was acquired by a global consultancy. Someone had to work out what that meant in practice. This is the work I am proudest of, and it has no screens at all.
- My role
- Led the integration, now Senior Manager
- Practice
- EY FCUX, EY India
- Scale
- Grew to 80 designers, 20 reporting to me at peak
- Built
- The 6D process, now standard across engagements
This case study is being written. The outline below is confirmed. The detail and the stories are still being assembled.
The problem
A studio and a consultancy do not want the same things
EY acquired Fortune Cookie UX in December 2018. I had been there since 2016 and stayed on through the transition, and the work of making the acquisition real fell largely to me: translating what the firm needed into design capability, reshaping roles, and placing designers onto engagements across a very large organisation.
Studios and consultancies disagree about almost everything that matters operationally. How work is scoped, how quality is judged, what a designer is accountable for, how long is long enough. Some of the studio’s habits had to go. Some of them were the reason EY bought it, and those had to be defended.
6D
The process exists to stop people designing too early
Discover, Define, Dream, Design, Develop, Deliver. The six stages matter less than the thing they enforce, which is that a team cannot reach for Figma until it has understood the business context and spoken to real users. Consulting teams under deadline pressure will always want to skip that. 6D is the structure that makes skipping it visible.
It is now the standard method across the practice’s engagements, and it has survived contact with joint delivery plans where a partner firm brought its own methodology.
Still to write
What this case study needs
The sections being assembled: what specifically had to change about how the studio worked and what I refused to change; how designers are matched to engagements; how a quality bar holds across twenty people without becoming a bottleneck; and the hiring and growth stories, anonymised.