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Creative juices become so diluted that you question whether you even put any Ribena in there in the first place.

The challenging relationships the vast majority of agencies have with clients makes it incredibly difficult to be proud of the finished article. Put simply, agencies answer to clients, and products answer to customers. There’s a massive difference between how agencies and in-house product teams operate. Spoiler alert - turns out it was the best decision I could have made - and I figure a year is a nice point in time to have a bit of a retrospective on the whole thing. In a single weekend I said goodbye to a role I knew inside-out, celebrated my son’s first birthday, and began a new job with a title I’ve never had before, working remotely. It was a taste that I couldn’t get rid of. I was fortunate enough to work on some fairly big projects at my previous agency, allowing me to taste those flavoursome acronyms of IA, UX and UI. Product design in the digital world was now a well-respected thing, and even though stories about Google offices having beds and giant slides weren’t realistically achievable for me to experience, they added to that itch. I guess it was around the 7-year mark (maybe the “ 7-year itch” applies to careers, too?) when I first decided I wanted to try something different. The breadth of design work, the camaraderie, the work hard play hard attitude, the ferocious pace (which has its own pros and cons of course), and there’s no denying the addictive energy. If you want out, there are a lot of good things that you have to consciously decide you don’t want any more. To be clear, this isn’t an agency-bashing post, there’s a lot going for them. Amplify those extremes even further if you’re in an agency. Working in design can be as euphorically rewarding as it can be emotionally draining. If your career as a designer has been anything like mine, it’s been varied to say the least. They tend to be focussed, disciplined and most importantly, pleasant places to be, but more on that later. Or any other company that offer up Product Designer roles for that matter - and people are now excited to work at these places for good reason.

The thought of working for the likes of Facebook at the time brought with it images of being hunched over a computer in a window-less room with a pool of vitamin D forming under my chair. Facebook had only just been released to the world, when you no longer required a university email address to sign-up. As a designer you got a job at a design agency and that was that. When I started out, fresh out the university oven, the job title ‘product designer’ was given to those who designed chairs for contortionists, or giant lemon squeezers that looked like space ships. I’m going to work as a designer for a take-away delivery company!” I’d have looked at you a bit funny. Onwards!ġ0 years ago, if you came to me and said “James, this university education has really paid off. Or at least spark conversations around them. I thought I’d share some of the differences that stood out to me, as perhaps they will be useful to anyone else considering this leap. Your agency “catch-all design” and product design are very different disciplines. ‍ I’ve been in the design industry over 9 years now - 8 of those being purely in agencies - with my transition to the product design arena being very much a leap of faith. The chronicles of an agency creative turned product designer.