15 Jul Leadership at Synechron
As Head of the Digital Practice at Synechron, my role included setting the strategy for how design would drive business value and ensuring every Digital-team led engagement demonstrated excellence in execution and outcome.
I established and developed the first Digital Practice group in North America and achieved significant results in my 1.5 year tenure. The Digital Practice included three functional capabilities: Product, Design, and Design Technology (App Development). Organization size at exit: ~900 staff total; 28 Design; 30 Product; 800 Technologists.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Partnering with product and engineering leaders to align on strategy and deliver business wins
Building and mentoring the company’s first North America Digital Practice
Strengthening design operations
RESULTS
New Digital Team Members
CLIENT ENGAGEMENTS
innovation conversions
Million digital revenue
Strategies
Established Foundations
Realigned a roster of 700+ Digital Team members to functional roles in Product, Design and Design Technology.
Created career progression frameworks for Design and Product functional groups that were implemented across pre-existing Digital units in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Ukraine and Belfast.
Kickstarted Design Intern program within company-wide DEI program for increasing female hiring and staffing rates.
Scaled Digital Business
Expanded Digital’s role within existing client engagements through pitch presentations to executive stakeholders at top 10 global banks.
Introduced new design-capability based opportunities as accelerants to development-only partnerships at Asurion, Jewelers Mutual, TIAA, CBNA and Scotia Bank.
Deepened engagements with limited design involvement at Cardworks, Wells Fargo and US Bank.
Built Cross-Org Partnerships
Leveraged the company’s ‘FinLabs’ innovation accelerators as pilots for modeling collaboration between accelerator’s development leads/owners, product and design teammates. New technologies with most client “traction” were selected for the design-partnership program, including InsurTech, WealthTech, NexusAI, and RegTech accelerators.
Inclusion of design and product collaboration resulted in more tightly-defined productization of accelerator technologies and explicit demonstration of technologies through client-customized user interfaces.
Identifed Top Opportunities
With a comprehensive understanding of Synechron’s overall client base and existing engagement profiles and after attending leadership offsites that clarified business priorities and CEO-direction, I created a strategic plan for the NA Digital Practice.
The plan included focused client relationship building on three key accounts and the development of two additional design capabilities: innovation leadership and service design. Over a 6-9 months, I unified the two efforts, culminating in 2 new client engagements for Discovery engagements (200k).
Socialized Digital
I led numerous Digital knowledge-shares, case studies, client “journey room” workshops and Digital Q&A’s to grow the awareness of the Digital Practice team and its capabilities, as well as demonstrate our willingness to collaborate and the value distinction evident in design-inclusive outcomes.
I implemented the requirement for Design and Product Leads to present Digital case studies. Digital team leaders gained practice in storytelling, building influence and presentation-building. Their cross-org presentations not only grew the Practice’s level of maturity, yet also up-skilled leads in their communication abilities.
Challenges
Staff Augmentation Model
Synechron’s primary value stream is via staff augmentation, specifically decreasing client costs through offshore and nearshore teaming.
Synechron leadership aspired to improve its limited market position and increase its recognition for consulting leadership across all aspects of emerging technologies.
Showing substantive revenue from Digital-based consulting engagements required longer timelines than the standard staff-aug escalations and revenue wins. With pressure to perform at pace within a down economy, Synechron Sales leaders maintained more focus on staffing revenue streams than developing holistic consulting leads and opportunities.
Cultural Mindset
Aside from a Marketing team that was evolving at a high growth rate, the majority of Synechron employees were engineering and development-focused. The distribution of majority- technical skillsets carried across all cascades from leadership to IC levels.
Without representative levels of Digital capabilities in Product Ownership and Design, there were vastly limited opportunities to model the value add of these functions. And with slim to zero ability to model Digital engagements or digital collaboration contexts, the potential to change entrenched behaviors was also restricted.