The Harsh Truth

When we decided to stop being a full service multidisciplinary agency and focus into a studio that works between the intersection of physical and digital in 2018, we did a massive overhaul of the entire business. Overnight we had to shift our mindset and go from a 24 member team comprising of a multidisciplinary team to only 4 of us focusing on ID and UX/UI. Some moved on to higher education, some took breaks and the others we helped with finding jobs until they did.

I took over BD/Marketing, Sales, HR, hiring, legal and Creative direction, while Arun Kumar took over physical products and Joel D'Silva took over Digital. Anil Ramesh took over engineering and Bala kumharen Devika Menon and Sushant Shivaram were the troopers who worked on all projects with this new initiative. That year we hit 6 figures in our revenue with just 6 of us.

I have always worked in smaller teams as they have more focused people who want to create an impact. In my previous jobs, i had setup and built similar teams. So i was quite confident we could do the same in 2018 and that was the main push behind downsizing and building it all back up.

In growth phases, a focused team and a smaller team of lean professions with a high level of emotional intelligence is better than a large hierarchical team.

For 6 months in 2018, we stopped talking work and shut ourselves in a small basement in Wework Bannerghatta and built the version of Analogy. This at that time was our website, our focus, discovery questions, the process we would follow and so much more. Literally a new company was born. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of helping young minds ( some joined as Interns) become leaders and i could sense the confidence and decision making capabilities bolster over the years of their growth. I was always there pushing and prodding like a doctor who feels until he/she finds the area that hurts the most. My style of leadership has always been about improving your strengths rather than your weaknesses.

Building the Design leaders of tomorrow feels like a purpose i can align to and it makes sense to me. It doesn't matter where they go, but they will always carry the values instilled and make design better around them.

We had a fantastic 5 years working on some amazing projects and as it is with consulting, 5-6 years is like a decade of work experience and eventually Arun, Anil and Joel moved on to explore other avenues and careers in early 2023. We had planned for this over a year and a half and it did not feel abrupt. That was something i greatly appreciated. I guess it was the bond we built.

Because i worked with these guys so closely to setup what Analogy is today, we were bound by a common set of values that we all agreed upon without any documentation, manifesto or on boarding deck of sorts. It was trial by fire and we saw what worked and what didn't in real time and course corrected immediately.

I am now faced with the task of building a core team from the ground up again and the reason for me writing this is not only to let others know how i did it once, but also so that i can relive these revelations for the next couple of years while a fresh set of designers, leaders and ops guys take up positions. I don't think this is a cause for alarm, but an opportunity to work and build it from the ground up just like we did in 2018.

In the mid of 2022 and 2023, we hired a pool of very young and extremely talented designers and creatives to augment the existing team at Analogy. Here are some of the mistakes we made and my learning's from it.

The first one was in hiring the team first and subsequently establishing the studio in Indiranagar. This approach failed to foster a genuine bond or connection with the team, as they entered a pre-existing studio that projected a somewhat corporate and overly perfected atmosphere. The importance of team cohesion is when you can actively engage with each new team member, building a personal connection that instills a collective sense of purpose. I term this shared experience the 'collective build-up,' wherein team members not only comprehend the vision and motivations behind what we are creating at Analogy but also the unique work culture we embrace. Establishing a connection is crucial, especially given my intricate work style and motivations. Without this understanding, the relationship between the design team and decision-makers can become transactional, transforming the work into just another job, devoid of a shared purpose

Involve the core team in developing the vision and the purpose, so they can align to what you are building, they can they see you leading from the front rather than just the orders. They really need to align with the founder early on.

The second was allowing our team of young designers to remain idle as we sought out the perfect projects for them. Instead of immersing them in 'jump into the water and figure it out' type projects, we hesitated. Simultaneously, I conducted an experiment in the BD/Sales space. Traditionally, I believed that hiring an experienced salesperson was crucial. However, my encounters were mostly with salespeople who were focused on percentages and driven by financial gains, traits incompatible with growth and scale. Determined to find someone with a fresh perspective, genuine interest, and motivation in the field, I embarked on a year-long journey working closely with Aadithya Putiyan. Together, we developed and experimented with a new sales process, various approaches, and stabilized our strategies. Though this period resulted in around six months of minimal workload and likely the loss of some great opportunities, I was focused on long-term gains, aligning with our expansion plans beyond just the two studios in Bangalore and Singapore

Do not hire until you have a plan in place and have the right infrastructure. Growth throws these curve balls but you have to anticipate this and find the right balance of cost, people and situations. You might lose out on that stellar candidate but it's best for the overall team and the brand.

We found ourselves in a situation where constructing a comprehensive deck outlining our values and objectives, and subsequently instilling these principles in new employees, became a necessary undertaking. Unfortunately, amidst the simultaneous development of various projects, time constraints prevented us from executing this crucial cultural onboarding effectively. This oversight resulted in a significant loss of cultural capital for the organization. It boiled down to unfortunate timing, where our primary focus shifted to firefighting and scaling concurrently, leaving little room to invest adequately in the foundational aspects of our company culture

Take time to setup a simple but robust on boarding process where the people coming in are given clear responsibilities, expectations, what is negotiable and what is non negotiable. Goes a long way rather than daily fire fighting.

Having a core team that had been integral to both the inception and expansion of Analogy, we became accustomed to operating without the need for explicit systems. The collaborative synergy built over five years made training unnecessary among the existing team members. However, the downside of this lack of structured systems and SOPs became apparent when attempting to onboard a new team into a coherent workflow. This deficiency resulted in a myriad of challenges encompassing tool usage, questions related to time sheets, check-in and check-out procedures, and other fundamental policies that should ideally require no debate. It was during my time in Singapore with Joel that I received the first call indicating an exit, signaling the onset of a potential domino effect.

Sometimes its best to let things unfold and trying to control it makes it even worse, go with the flow.

Working on setting up multiple locations at the same time. Perfecting the India team had to be the first priority before we scale it elsewhere. This led to a lot of starts and stops and drained resources, costs and also brain power. A huge shout out here to Joel who led this and made it look easy.

Setup one studio, team, process, client and talent pool and break it down to the most minute detail and check if it can be replicated before thinking of the next location or scaling.

Maintain a clear understanding of your identity and never hesitate to communicate that to others. The establishment of core values, a shared purpose, the distinctive personality of the company, and the fundamental personas of team members and clients, if not defined from the outset, can have detrimental effects on both reputation and brand. As a studio owner, it is essential to consistently qualify individuals, and if their alignment is lacking, swift parting of ways is the most prudent course of action. Attempting to reconcile differences in expectations is often futile and can exacerbate the existing disparities, making it more sensible to acknowledge misalignment's and take decisive action

Alignment is probably the most underrated and most important thing whether its clients or team members. Do not be afraid to say " hey i think its not you, its me, but this is not working".

Every service business in Design goes through what i call a growth and plateau stage. When we plateau, we need to look at what to update, evolve and move to the next stage. How we do it is always subjective but the intent behind it is very purposeful and intentional.

Try and explain this to the team in such a way that its not too complicated without the business jargon and most of the time, the sensible will understand and a few gears in their minds will shift. It always helps to involve younger leaders who are interested in learning the business, provided they have the right emotional stability to handle failures.

So all in all, things are good at Analogy, we have not changed as a company, or our focus or what we stand for. We have not been able to help fresh team members coming in to understand who we are and what we are about but we are about to change that. We are still the same old, hungry, upbeat studio always looking for interesting work, committed to taking design up a notch and on our quest for global domination in the Physical meets interaction space. There is a huge opportunity for people to fill up the spaces and shoes of some amazing people who have believed that Analogy as a studio can be the first global Industrial design studio from India. If you are interested in our core values and are not afraid of building and getting your hands dirty, you can DM me or reach out on our careers page if you see a fit. Here are a list of open positions below:

You can apply on this form below, please don't send any emails with your portfolios. https://forms.monday.com/forms/c4f7495083fc4acbd27e4ae96ac89696?r=use1

Some shots of the new studio below.