How Corporate and Agency Design Teams Differ
When first initiating your project the topic of design team structure can differ based on your product requirements & company size. This also differs in structure from corporate to agency, knowing how to integrate the two for a project is also challenging.
Corporate
When working with a corporate environment the design team may be nested under product or marketing teams. In larger organizations you may have the opportunity to work with a design team that is separate from those two and scales up to a creative director or head of design.
Design may integrate into the stream of work for product, marketing and development dependent on the work at hand.
When speaking of the roles within a design team you can have the following ones available: product designer, user experience designer, visual designer, and interactive designer. You may also have the privilege to work with a user researcher and copywriter.
Within a corporate environment they may be product oriented meaning they lean on the business side of things and look to work through incremental updates to the service or product. Thought I’ve seen organizations that put design in parallel to the other divisions.
Agency
When working with agency structures they lean more on the expertise side of design. This means you will potentially have a more linear process where as corporate may be more agile. Designers may work in more specific siloes and in a highly collaborative environment than a corporate structure.
The agency may have several clients where feedback may be received from different teams and dependent on their skills they may or may not touch the development portions.
Taking this into consideration it is also interesting to see how a corporate team may team up with a design agency to complete a project.
Also note that agencies may differ in size and services, I’ve come across the following variations, boutique agency, full service agency and design agency.
If you have any questions around this matter, MSDB7 is available for your design and consulting needs.