Bringing digital skills in-house is often the goal of any business that relies on digital for a significant amount of revenue. For us, this move is often a good indicator of overall digital maturity: a desirable end state that gives leaders the best control. There are different approaches to in-housing digital — some more successful than others. In the spirit of celebrating and owning mistakes, the anti-patterns that follow are largely from my own errors, and if you were involved in any of them I thank you for your patience and tolerance.

1. Everything everywhere all at once

The breadth of skills that make up digital is huge, and before bringing a skillset in-house it’s critical to ensure you have the skills to manage it to best effect. When I first led transformation projects, I saw it as a huge logistics exercise: we had to do as much as possible, as soon as possible. The result was often confusion, and inefficiency. Now, when in-housing, we recommend bringing specific skills and groups of skills in-house together, in phases. For example, we often recommend focusing first on bringing in-house data and product management, as this will start to give you control over third party developers and designers. Next, you might want to bring engineering in-house. Here your initial focus may be on DevOps to gain control over environments, architecture and platforms. Having done this you could move on to QA, establishing testing standards and processes. Finally, you could bring the developers themselves in-house. The next logical step would be to in-house your design function encompassing research, UX and UI. The order here may be determined by how much you know about the user, how fit for purpose your existing design system is, and the amount of design work required in the short to medium term.

2. Top, middle, bottom

When in-housing, it can be tempting to start by looking for a few experienced hires. I know from experience the exhilarating challenge of being put in charge of creating a whole new function from scratch. And experienced practitioners will often bring their own playbooks, patterns, processes and cultures that can really help a new function to hit the ground running.

The danger here is that with experience often comes a lack of familiarity with the needs of day to day practitioners.

A long time ago I was a UX and I last put together a production-quality design more than a decade ago. So I’m definitely not the right person to know how the cool kids are using [insert latest UX software here].

Instead, we encourage leaders to first hire highly experienced practitioners — perhaps people looking to step up into leadership themselves. They can set the patterns and processes for others to follow, as well as providing sufficient ‘air cover’ to the leadership while the functions get going.

The organisation can then start to look for less experienced practitioners, and identify its functional leaders.

3. Keeping baby in the corner

Like in every other walk of life, digital people often pride themselves on their specialisms — the tribe they identify with most strongly.

Functional leaders often make a virtue of their tribal roots. Those from an engineering background may be proudly diagnostic and vaunt their Linux credentials loudly. Meanwhile, those from a UX background may accentuate the importance of design and aesthetic from the safety of their bestickered MacBook.

In contrast, my experience is that great digital leaders are those that can bridge away from whichever skill set or corner of digital they started in. They know they will always have these core skills to underpin their thinking and experiences, but are bold in reaching beyond what they’ve traditionally been asked to do.

When reaching beyond your core skill set you need both permission and humility. Permission by those you are working with to help you build your knowledge and skills, and to understand why those you bring might be relevant and useful. And humility to create the conditions to allow specialists to thrive, while building your own knowledge and skills.

By embracing this curious, courageous and learning-centred approach to change, we see leaders from a digital background have impact and success beyond just digital. Think about UX folks broadening into CX – using the skills they have learned in listening to and understanding behaviour to make the connection with customer service. Or performance marketing experts starting to take a lead in wider demand generation and commercial ownership.

The time has come for digital to get out of its corner, folks!

4. In-house strategy, outsource delivery

When I led my first full organisation transformation programme, the bit I was most excited about was stripping the strategy away from third parties and leaving them just with the delivery responsibility.

A few months after starting, however, I realised I needed to change tack. What I had found was that by boldly cutting any input into strategy from third parties, I had lost some of the wisest brains I had access to. The other casualty was that the delivery itself started to suffer: without the strategic context and senior leadership within the third party, those ‘on the ground’ started to make poor decisions.

I’d accidentally broken up with my partner… but couldn’t do it all without them.

I also lacked specialists with the same depth of experience these people had within my organisation — I’d been brought in as ‘the specialist’, but this was a pretty isolated position to be in, and lacked challenge.

Looking back, what I needed to do was:

1. Build a new commercial understanding that reflected I was taking leadership for things that had previously been valuable work streams for the leadership of the third party
2. But still keep access to these smart people
3. And keep them engaged in making sure those on the ground continued to deliver to both quality (should be a given) but also to strategy (only possible if the leaders know what the strategy is)
4. This may have had the structure of something like a steering group.

At the time I’d probably have thought the idea of paying a third party to input into strategy eroded my authority. I like to think I now have the humility to know when I need to pay someone to enrich and challenge my thinking.

In the words of Mary Schmich: “Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.”

5. The false economy of capacity constraints

When I first moved client side I had had little exposure to how enterprises run budgeting. I naively assumed that the resource I’d been given was the only resource I could possibly get, and managed within this envelope carefully.

What I failed to do was stand back and identify the potential opportunities and choices available, rather than think about the resources available to me – since they were the product of a budgeting exercise some months previously.

If I’d done this, I may have been able to present my superiors and peers with some interesting options, which would probably have looked like this:

1. We could spend the same and get roughly what we thought we might
2. We might actually choose to spend less in the short term while we get our house in order, but reduce our expectations accordingly
3. We could spend more, but get better ROI by doing so

So why didn’t I do this? Firstly, inexperience – I just didn’t know this was feasible, and lacked the expertise to be able to assess ROI with anything like enough specificity.

But I also wanted to prove I could weather a storm. My mindset was probably a bit like that of Gordon Brown when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997: I wanted to show I could stick to planned spending religiously, never mind the opportunity cost.

In summary

1. In-house in phases by functional domain
2. Look for key functional leaders who are going to stay close to the coal face, not those who are more experienced but less hands on
3. Make sure your functional leaders look beyond their comfort zone and expand both into other parts of digital and beyond
4. Work out how to use trusted third parties to support strategy, not just ‘deliver’
5. Keep an open mind on the commercial choices available: it could be possible to achieve more with more or more with less!

Zebra Associates are specialists in helping businesses of all sizes to in-house digital. If this is something you’re interested in, why not get in touch.