 All right. We are just hitting the YouTube live button and we are also live on YouTube. Well, welcome today guys to the future of design freelancing, productization. Thank you for joining whenever you are, wherever you are. Let's start with a quick introduction and I'll go first. So I'm Chris, I'm a product designer. I quit my head of design job in 2020 and started a UX education company called UX Playbook. Helping designers of all levels, whether it's building your own studio, learning fundamental UX frameworks from any projects, to how to supercharge your career and manage your first design team. The idea is really to take you from zero to uniform designer and we have Philip, how are you doing today? Hi, I'm great. Thanks for having me. It's been on the books for a few days and totally excited for this session. I'm sure we'll have some fun. And we also have Jeremy on the call. Jeremy is going to help us moderate. Jeremy, do you want to do a quick introduction of yourself? Yeah, what's up everybody? So I'm Jeremy, friends of these two knuckleheads and I'll be keeping an eye on the comments. So you got any questions at any point? Feel free to throw them in there. I'll be keeping track of that. And we'll get your questions answered as they pop up. So use the chat. Thank you very much. Sorry, I had some echo from my side. Okay, yeah, so I had some echo from my side, but now it's gone. So yep. And I want to encourage folks who are listening and tuning in to use that comment section. Let's start with just dropping a flag of wherever country you're tuning in from or just comment your city and just keep it as interactive as possible. Okay, so why are we here today? Well, according to Satista, there's an estimated 1.5 billion freelancers globally. That's people who are self-employed. And the gig economy is predicted to reach 450 billion in 2023 this year. And by 2027 in the US alone, freelancers will reach 87 million. That's over 50% of the workforce. If that doesn't seem crazy, the most popular freelancing field is web and graphic design with a global average hourly rate of just $21. Okay, lots of numbers. It sounds crazy, but what does it actually mean? There's so much competition out there. It's a growing market and majority of us get underpaid as designers. So that brings us to today's topic and question. What does design freelancing look like in the future? So by the end of this live session, you would have learned about productization, what it is. More importantly, how to productize your design service, the power of the design sprint, we'll get to that in a minute, or to help you future-proof your freelancing career. So let's dive into our first topic with Philip. What is productization? Can you help us share some of your thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. I'll get the screen share back in a second. But first, let's just have a chat together. Everyone tuning in on either LinkedIn and YouTube. Thank you so much for making the time. It's a pleasure to be here. And yeah, productization. So to kick it off, I would probably have to take one step back and explain to you where I came from. So I've been a freelancer for a very long time. I started as a digital designer almost two decades ago. I'm located in the Netherlands. And I've gone through quite a lot of steps. So when I started, it was actually in web design, building small websites for small businesses. And the thing that I always was really interested in about was why do you do what you do? And how do you separate yourself from your competitors? What value do you offer? And I experienced when you're talking to small business owners who want the website and you ask those types of questions, the answer you get is stop asking me this difficult questions. I just need a website. So after getting my heart broken for seven years, I made the switch to UX design. I started as a freelancer, reached out to the largest Dutch digital agencies, which worked out really well. I got to work on projects for Lego and Adidas. And from there on, I've been freelancing for over 12 years for a lot of the big names. And I've been trying to build a design thinking studio. I've been working as a freelancer. I've worked in-house as a freelancer. And I always ran into situations that some of the aspects I really enjoyed, and there were some aspects that I really didn't enjoy. And productization for me is really the answer that comes out of 20 years working as a digital designer in one form or another. And Chris, yeah, fair question. So what even is productization? To me, I think it's important to talk about the challenges of freelancing. And if it's OK with you, I'll just throw open the slide that I have on that topic. Yes, please do. And if you guys are facing any of these problems, let us know with a thumbs up emoji as Philip walks through this as well. Exactly. So the brutal truth, we all know that it's hot and happening to be a freelancer. Truth be told, it's definitely not for everyone. So I think, well, there's quite a list here, but living gig to gig, I think we can all experience that feast and famine cycle. Either you're super busy with a lot of work and what do you do when you're super busy with client work? You immediately park all your outreach. And that means you're busy doing the work. You finish the work. And guess what? There's no new work because you stopped doing your outreach because you were so busy. Sometimes projects go out of scope, or they never get finished. So if you work on an hourly basis, yeah, well, have fun explaining to the customer that it will take more hours and be more expensive. But on the other hand, if you offer a fixed price and the work increases, you're also not happy. Well, we all know what imposter syndrome is. And the list goes on and on and on. So maybe, Jeremy, something in the chat, maybe, from people that recognize these types of things? Nothing has yet a little bit of a delay with LinkedIn Live. So we just got to this point a second ago. OK, OK. That is very true. Yeah, I think there's, like, a 30 seconds away. All right. It's got, yeah. I'll put. All right, but great. Thank you. So no matter if you hear this a little bit later, please do let me know, like, what are some of these challenges that you can identify with? Because they were, I think I can check them all off, Chris. How about you? Yeah. Talk to me more about manually doing everything. Surely, in lots of types of businesses, you still manually do stuff. Why, I guess, when we're talking about productization, why do we not have to do that? Yeah, great question. So the idea with productization, of course, let me just first talk about, well, what it actually is. Normally, if a client comes to you and they say, like, hey, we need a UX designer. What is your hourly rate? Can we work together? And we'll figure out what we do. We'll think about some number of time that it'll take you. But it's a horrible way of doing things because you don't really have a good idea on how long the project will last. You have no idea on the scope of things. It's not a repeatable process. So you're reinventing the wheel every time, which also means that you have to think about every step along the way. So when we talk about manually doing everything, think about comparing it to having your playbook and maybe to give you an example. Let's think about you as a UX designer or product designer. Maybe you have some sort of an audit. And you can say, hey, if you buy this product from me, it'll cost you this much money. And I know exactly step one to step 20. This is what I do. And when I've done those steps, it's done. And once you've actually designed your service or your product in that way, you can actually say, well, OK, what can I now automate? So maybe you can say, well, I always ask these questions during the intake. Maybe you can create some sort of type form or whatever tool you use. Maybe you can record videos for onboarding. Maybe you can even with Zapier do some cool automations and things like that. So once you've actually designed your product and therefore also the process, you can then think about what you can automate. Got it. So standardizing process and with standardizing process, does it come with specifically a fixed price or should you be value based pricing everybody? Yeah, that's that one is a personal question, I would say. I think, of course, we do, well, at least most of us would agree that in an ideal world, we would get away from the hourly rate. I think that's a very topic on its own. But once you say, well, this is the product that I have, you can choose to either maybe go for volume and mass because maybe it's more of a do-it-yourself product or something that takes up a lot less time. And you really want to go broad with your product. Then I would say have that price that's always the same for everyone. If you maybe have a more unique offering and you maybe say, well, I only need to sell 10 times a year, depending on the client you would have and maybe also the impacts that you can make with your product, that would allow for charging a different price even for the same product. Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I hear standardizing processes, standardizing your offer or at least crafting a nice package that you can then scale your business by offering it at the same price to a larger customer base or customizing it based on who that customer is. And but ultimately, I guess, is to gain more predictable revenue as well in the long term. Is that true? Yeah, exactly. So predictability is definitely a very important factor. Once you know that whenever you sell your product, how much time it would take, that would allow you to determine your capacity as a freelancer. So if you know your capacity, you can also know how much you can sell and maybe even build up a waiting queue. One of the other benefits, of course, is scalability. And I think scalability is a very interesting topic. It's actually, I think, one of the most important things about productization because when we normally think about scaling our business, the first thing that comes to mind to a lot of people is actually hiring people. But there are different ways that you can scale your business. And I think if you think about capacity, so maybe you would say, OK, on a yearly basis, I can deliver 12 of my products, whatever that would be. If it's design sprints, that's fine. Then think about, once again, back to automation and how you can optimize your process to maybe say, well, next year, I'll be able to deliver 20 of my products. So without hiring, but with automation and software and documentation, I think you've been able to double the size of your business by increasing your capacity. So I just want for us to define productization, I guess, in one sentence. Let me have a go and you tell me if it makes sense. So productization is a process of turning a service into a marketable product. Does that sound like does it work? Yeah, it's packaging. I think one of the emojis that I use on LinkedIn or in a lot of places is that box. It's really packaging that service. But what is important that I would add to it is that you can sell it repeatedly without the need to start from scratch each time. Got you. OK, all right. Cool, great. And let me ask you this. Who can productize products like can anybody do this? What kind of freelancers are we talking about that can actually do this? Or is it so accessible that my grandmother can do this? I do not dare to speak on the behalf of your grandmother but I do have some sort of a persona matrix that I created a while ago to think about the field of creative freelancers. So I'm helping creative freelancers to actually productize their service. But I did say to myself, I don't want to niche down as specific to saying I only help UX designers because I think I can help product designers as well but I think I can also help web designers. But I do want to stay within our own field. I think, for example, photo and video are quite often already packages. I mean, when you would hire a photographer for a shoot, they don't, or at least from my experience, don't really calculate the hours anymore but they offer you a package price. So they're already there in a way. But if we would take one step back to freelancers, I think it's important to make distinctions between two types of freelancers. So on the left side, we can talk about freelancers who work on multiple short-term projects. So these would be maybe web designers who take on multiple clients at the same time. On the right side, we have these freelancers who work on long-term projects in-house. So that would be anywhere from like up to beyond three months and longer. So maybe having a contract of six or 12 months at a client and you get to build your 32, 36, 40 hours a week on your hourly rate. So if we have these two types, and on the left side for shorter projects, I think those are the people who suffer the most from that feast and famine cycle. It's quite chaotic because you have to context switch between projects. You need to keep track of, hey, from this client, I need that before I can continue. It's therefore also more difficult to plan. So you might not work the regular nine to five hours, I would say. And the sad thing is, I think they work harder than in-house freelancers, but they earn less. And I think that's ridiculous. So if you then take a look at those long-term freelancers, yeah, it could be, of course, yes, they have that stability. But it kind of feels like a job. It's mostly at these larger corporate environments that, well, the creative designers are not always as fond of, perhaps. So that's a bit of a difference between the left and the right side. But I also think it's important to talk about the maturity. And I'd really love to hear from the audience and I know we have a bit of a delay. When you're starting out as a freelancer, you might charge an hourly rate. You might have work come your way from your network, which means you're not really selling and you also don't have a process that you will always follow for all of your projects. And I think when there's a freelancer who is a higher maturity, they would sell products or packages or subscriptions, value-based pricing, and they are able to clearly communicate their value and they know these are the people that I'm helping and this is what I actually help them with. So I hope that resonates a bit with the people to maybe get the ball rolling a bit. Let me prompt the folks in the chat to see what they are saying. We've got a question from Manny Cortez. One man agency that offers productized design services got his start by posting on Product Hunt. Do you think this is still a way to market your services today? Or are there other ways that you would recommend? Wow, Product Hunt. I would recommend trying it out. I think to be honest, and I think that's a bit of the tricky part about those types of questions, I think to be honest, what works for someone doesn't have to work for someone else, but at the other time, if you've seen it work for someone else, why would you not try it? And I think we all have, or at least I have, when maybe on some social media I see some type of post that works really well and I'm like, maybe I don't want to do that and you would have to think for yourself like, hey, what would you rather? Would you rather be the cool kid and not do that? Or would you say, well, if it helps my business, maybe I should stop crying about it and think about how I can help my business? But it's a personal thing. I mean, of course, you started your own business for a reason, so you don't have to do it if you don't want to. But yeah, I would definitely consider giving it a try. I mean, if it works for you, why, yeah, it would be a shame not to write. Yeah, and I just want to jump in here. I've had some success with Product Hunt, so when I tried to start Backlog.design, it's also a product ties design service. I did lots of research on Product Hunt and there was actually a lot of competition and priced pretty competitively as well, right? Kind of a race to the bottom in my opinion and so a lot of design agencies, web agencies are trying this Product Hunt approach just because obviously the success of DesignJoy, I've seen another one been really, really popular on Twitter. I think they're called bait.design. I think they're on 100KMRR, which is absolutely insane for a product ties agency. But some channels work for others, as Philip said, and some don't. So I think it's all about trying to figure out where your customers are and just experimenting. So that's kind of my hot take. Totally agree. So Philip, there's no question in the chat. You have that one to ask you. Go ahead. One of the things you're talking about is experimenting, right? So this idea of trying different things, seeing what works, what works for one person might not work for somebody else. Do you have a method or framework that you like to use to track those experiments? You can start to see changing variables. Yeah, use some data. Yeah. I thought you were going to do an easy question. I was already having that design thinking methodology answer up my sleeve. And then you went to make it even more spicy. Okay, tracking. Okay, so this is not one of the things that I'm an expert at. I'm not an online marketing guru. I do know, of course, that with UTM tags you can do a lot of conversion tracking. But I think to be honest, since I'm such a simpleton myself, whenever I would have my onboarding or the sales moment, well, right after the sales moment, I don't want to interrupt anyone when they're making a sale. But right after, like, hey, thank you so much. Totally hyped to get started just before we begin. How did you find me or where did you come from? That could be an option. But yeah, the right way would probably be UTM tracking. But I'm not an expert on that part. So I would say Google and research or find someone smarter on me on that topic. What about you, Chris? Thanks. That's okay. Let's move on. I just want to add that I'm also an expert at tracking and I'm notoriously bad when it comes to I launch it first and then I figure out the details later when I want to drill down into the nitty gritty, let's just say. But high-level metrics are important. Is the other things on the side that I always forget? But let's move on to the questions. All right. So we got Gilberto Madrano asked, he summarized it and wanted to see if this was accurate. So you tell me if this is right. Service product system and automation of your design process to create modular, repeatable and scalable chunks of design tasks that deliver tangible value to clients. Is this a fair summary? Yeah, I think modular could be optional. Oh, one sec. There goes my camera. Let's see if we can stop this from melting down. That question was too good. He just smacked it out. Yeah, exactly. Such a good question. I immediately ran off. So I can answer that in the dark, but I think I'm getting back there. And I will charge this battery. So modular might be optional. I do think, of course, that and someone mentioned design joy. And I think design joy has the design subscription and a additional module that you can attach would be the Webflow development stuff. So yes, modular could be the case, but you can also say I have some sort of bronze, silver and gold package, which might not necessarily be like an additional module on top of it. It could be something else to give you a bit of a more tangible example. It could be like, hey, the bronze version is you do it yourself. The silver is you get a bit of time from me and the gold package is I do it for you. So it's not necessarily modular, but I think it was a beautiful summary, to be honest. All right. We got another question here from Eddie Webb. Let's say that you found value offer your process and essentially you've got your product, but it's still you doing, how would you go about bringing in extras to identify which should be prioritized outsource? Okay, so that's a lot. Okay, I think if that is the question, you're already at a really nice point because the hardest part is finding that product market fit and also something of yourself with your skills and personality to go full trifecta. Then if you have that up and running, I would say open up notion. Yes, it's time for notion and document your process, like really say like, okay, if somebody buys my thing, this is exactly what happens. And that is a great starting point to find opportunities on where you might be able to automate. And if you do want to outsource things, you already have a guide or a manual that actually explains how your products or services work. And if you really want to go for bonus points like record a video of yourself, maybe doing it once. So if you would outsource it, maybe people would even have a video where they can look how it's done and as a supporting document. So that's what I would do. And the same with as a customer journey, for example, if you have a customer journey and you see something like this hurts or this takes up a lot of time in my delivery, I would say spend some time to think about how you can do that smarter and faster. So I'm going to ask you a question here. I'm going to, sorry, sorry, I think that's how this is pronounced. So he doesn't ask this. What he's implying. So I'm going to spend the question a bit, but design joy and. Description based design services rather than a productized service. Do you see a difference between a subscription based product or a product? A lot of things. That's my question. I don't know if that's exactly right. No, I absolutely love that question. I actually wrote a newsletter once upon a time. Shitting. No, just kidding. But I had some thoughts about design joy because I do think what the most innovative thing about it, one could argue, is the subscription thing. And it's really a change in the payment model. At the end of the day, I think it's very nice how he got rid of the meeting. He's with the Trello board. So I think that is a smart part, but simply creating a subscription service. I would not say is productization because with productization, you really want to think about standardizing the process, optimizing it, automating it where you can. And that's not always the case with those subscription models. I think about subscription every, every thing you could have a different request every, every time. And so in that case, productizing anything, you're just, you're streamlining your payment plan, I guess, but you aren't streamlining the product. And I think about productizing, it's, you know, creating a streamlined revenue stream. It's also a streamlined, streamlining your effort. That subscription based thing is not streamlining your effort at all because it could be different every time. Right. He's just making a recurring revenue, right? Like he's just kind of locking the client in month over month. I think where he productize, which Philip alluded to, which is how one, how he took in work, like Trello board, so completely async. So that's him saying, no, no meetings, right? Standardize. And once you submit something into Trello, it's actually managed through Airtable and everything is on one sheet, right? So he just has to knock him back and then once it's done, it updates Trello. So he's automated that part of the process, which is part of productization, right? Less effort. And also, we know how long stakeholder review meetings are, right? They suck, too. Right. And if you could charge $1,000 an hour, not many people would do them, you know, every single day of the week, right? So I love that he got rid of that. I think it's ingenious. I mean, I've tried it. It's, it doesn't work because Slack becomes the other go-to spot and that is basically beyond the point. So a completely async way of submitting work, I think was also a game changer in his aspect. And he could just take on more clients then as well, which, you know, more revenue. And Chris, I think we should keep into consideration that people really enjoy meeting you and have meetings with you. So that's also maybe one of the reasons why that would be a challenge. Hey, but all jokes aside, I mean, it's easy to have, like, a lot to say about design joy. Truth be told, he's making bank, but the only thing that I would like to, like, add on before we move on to the next subject is really that we, as freelancers, as business owners, really need to think about how we want to design our own business. At the end of the day, I think he is working his ass off. I saw in an interview that he has three kids, he doesn't go on holiday and it's a choice. There's nothing good or bad about it. One could argue. But it's all about how you would want your business to work. And if you want to grind in your business, that's fine. But you can also say, you know what, I would prefer to work for a week and do different things with my time. There's nothing wrong with that, but you need to design your business accordingly. All right, so we had a I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Alexia Lakshmi, it looks like it was deleted though. So I don't know if you meant to do that, but I saw it pop up, but it's gone now. So if that was you, I'd like to please add it again. We have a question here from Keenan MB Goodwin. This one's interesting. I've heard of specializing when applying for jobs, you know, think target a specific niche or tailor a specific job. Would you say this applies for we be more generalized when we market and productize our service? Yes, that is a great question and I will use that to hijack once again the screen and go into a bit of a conversation on that part. So when it comes to freelancing and building your own business, you can do a lot of cool things and I think that really has to do with the way you are actually designing your offer. And when we think about exactly that question about niching down, we're being told to do that when applying for a job and why is that? Because you have a lot of competitors who have the exact same job. So if you're applying for a job as UX designer or product designer, guess what? Other people who are also a UI UX or product designer will also apply for that job. So how do you stand out from them? So I have an example that I quite often use. There are a lot of web designers out there and we have beautiful no-code, low-code, shenanigans going on, the web flow, the framer and yes, we still have web designers. But you're competing with other web designers. So imagine that now all of a sudden I would challenge you to think how are you different from the other web designers? And I know Chris makes the most beautiful things. I'm super jealous. But there might also be designers who wake up in the morning and want to fight the fight or the good fight on their own. So maybe you are an accessibility expert. Now imagine that you would target so who would benefit from that and that could be like government or semi-government industry that would benefit or would prioritize accessibility. It's a bit of oversimplification but it works for now. So all of a sudden you are becoming the web accessibility expert that helps government and semi-government create really accessible digital platforms. Dude, all of a sudden you're no longer one of ten web designers. You are the web accessibility guy. And all of a sudden you are the standout expert in that niche. So if we go back to your question and think about applying for a job versus productizing your business, it's about becoming a lot more relevant for your target audience because they don't care. Sure, they need a website but they really need a website from someone who is an accessibility expert. What are your thoughts on that, Chris? Jeremy, sorry. I'm just going to echo yes and yes. So quick poll for Philip. Are there any other things that you want to talk about when it comes to productization or should we talk about the design sprint in the frame of productization or is there something you want to touch on before we dive into one of the methods you can productize? Maybe how to get there? We could take a look and we could move on if you want. We do have four or five other questions about productizing but maybe Philip can go and answer them later on LinkedIn if you guys want. Why don't we take a few because as we're on the subject I think it's really interesting for folks. Why don't you fire off for a few, Jeremy? Alright, cool. I missed this one from earlier, MedfordTour asked what if the doesn't understand your product or doesn't value user-centered design? Then it's not your ideal client. That's a bit of a shitty answer but I think to be honest if we are really talking about becoming specific it's not only about becoming specific to your customers you should also become specific towards your customers. So if there are because I think one of the most painful or difficult questions that I get on this topic as well is people are asking what do I do if I run into a company that wants to work on an hourly rate? The painful thing is then you can explain why you don't work on an hourly rate because you've worked 20 years to work as fast as possible you automated things all the reasons why one should not want to work on an hourly rate but if there's no match for whatever reason you should also be able to say I'm sorry I can't help you because if I would help you I would need to do things very different in my business it will be ineffective I will lose a lot of time and I would love to help you but this is how I work and if it's not for them then it's a bit painful to say but then it's not for them. So this comes to a very interesting question which is is productising only for more senior members? Because if you're in the beginning surely you should just take on everything you can for experience right? Learning versus earning so how do you think about that when you're sort of giving advice to maybe more junior designers where they might not be able to pick and choose who they work with? That's a fair question I would want to say like stand your ground hold your ground I think it's really important to learn how to do your own so you can look for the right projects instead of being dependent on a few things that come your way because I think we feel obliged to take them on because we don't know what else is coming but once we get an understanding of who we are what we have to offer and who we can help you're turning that around but at the end of the day sure Ren needs to be paid kids need to be fed that green but I would at least advocate like at least do a 50-50 like if you get some work your way it's not ideal it's fine but spend at least the other half of your time on looking for what you do need and don't stay in that passive position to accept the work that comes your way if it's not the work you want to do Yeah and I fall into that trap as well where I'm just like oh I might as well say yes what else am I doing it's actually pretty key to kind of stand your ground and you know you're the one setting expectations to your clients and maybe that's for the best because the ones that kind of understand how you work will just be more pleasurable to work with versus ones that don't and you know sort of nickel and dime you in the way you work as well as your pocket so be careful so great advice Philip thanks Can I just do a quick plug because I think some of the questions are of course around the topic of productization I created a free open introduction course to productization which is called the productizer crash course if you go to my website which I will post in the chat or if you go to my LinkedIn I think most people are on the LinkedIn live thingy and please check it out it gives you an explanation of what it is how to get started what you need to look for in yourself as well and it is an actionable plan to get you up and going even if you're a starter freelancer this message was brought to you by me I love it we got a couple more questions I don't know if you guys you want to move on after this or we could wait to hear our question again when we're talking about not having a product manager so when we have these productized projects that come in and there is no product manager the product manager is missing how how do we we end up becoming you know the discovery you know all the requirements gathering and things like that how do we work and without a product manager when we've got that number of hours and we don't want to go over because we end up you know losing money if we end up doing more work than we were supposed to to make sense kind of paraphrase the question yeah I think the important thing is that we as freelancers really need to turn around the power hierarchy in the relationship with a client I think a client has a question or a problem or a need to be the person and take control of the situation saying okay this is your problem and this is how I would advise you to solve it this is the process and this is what we're going to do this is what you will get and this is what you won't get if all goes well the client hopefully would want more but then it's important once again to stand your ground and be able to say I'd love to help you with that this is what we agreed upon let's first do that and then figure out how we can proceed from there was that maybe an over simplification Chris or do you have any thoughts on it I don't know so I always encourage designers like if we're just talking about designers with zero product manager I always encourage designers to yes take that role on right like be strategic do your own discovery work you should not have other folks telling you these are the requirements like any designer out there that's what you should be doing anyway to cover your ass right not just to cover your ass but to do real good work you have to put the product hat on and go from there so even if it's not in this kind of productization wrapping I think as an advice for designers I would give is yes ideally you replace every single function and just build your own product but that's something different but just replace the product manager please if I can add one thing to that I think sorry Jeremy what I think is really interesting to keep in mind is that you don't need to replace your entire process with one product you can also think about the sprint you often see or the design sprint which we can talk about in a little bit which is just the first part of what you can actually offer what was that Jeremy you had something to add yeah I was going to say I mean what I'm hearing I'm just hearing both of you guys have very good points I think there's different levels where you might be in your career and there's one where Chris is at know this stuff I want to learn that as we move our career we progress we're doing this one thing and that's all I'm doing and if you don't like it tough you know you know when you call a plumber to come and fix your house you don't nickel and dime them and haggle with them you know maybe you should use a different kind of pipe are you sure you want to use that tape that wrench doesn't look right you know we would never do that and when I think about productizing going to the store and I get what I get I buy the thing off the shelf and that's it and I'm not going to go haggle that would never happen you just buy the cliff bar and you get what you get if you don't like cliff bar you buy a different brand so I think it's kind of it's interesting different levels I think you have to know where you are in your career to say this is for me I want to do this exactly or I want to learn and take on more stuff so anyway I'm just here I'm just kind of summarizing some thoughts in my head I'm hearing both of you guys I think there's just kind of an interesting thing to kind of call out loved it we've got I think if you guys want to move on there's a couple other kind of follow-up questions that were asked previously I do think we do have like 15 minutes officially I think let's move on to that last topic which is design sprints and then we can like leave it open for any questions for whoever wants to stay on as long as they want is that fair that sounds fair to me so let's talk about the power of design sprint in the frame of this productization why would a design sprint be suitable or let me first ask the naive question which is what is a design sprint a design sprint to me personally I'm not the king of textbook definitions but a design sprint is a four-day process in which you solve complex problems and it's actually the design thinking methodology in four days and I'm saying four days which is the 2.0 version coined by Aegean Smart versus the five-day version but that's a bit of details I guess the idea behind it is that you spend four days on solving a problem and how do you do that you start with focusing on what even is the problem and do we all understand the problem and do we think about the problem in the same way and then we all come up with our own idea of a solution for that problem you vote, you pick one and on the next day you start working on the prototype sorry I'm skipping one step so you pick one of those solutions and you refine it further because the original solution is like three screens and you want to create a realistic facade the prototype which could be eight or nine screens but that's nothing you of course build that prototype you test it with five real users because five is the magic number and of course then you have some sort of report saying well hey this was the problem we had different ideas we chose this idea because we thought it would be the best solution we made the prototype and we tested it and this is the outcome of it now what is so cool about it to me personally it's a great way inside of your projects I don't know if any of the other creatives have that challenge but sometimes it can be a bit tough to convince your stakeholders to do their due diligence because we all know the problem and I am certain this is the right solution so you get a bit of research in there but you also test it with real people and that's something that happens way not enough so I think that's really cool and the nice thing is you structure it for four days and I think you maybe or maybe you don't know the expression that if you book a meeting and you schedule it for an hour the meeting will take one hour and if you schedule it for two hours guess what it will take two hours so I think the design sprint is a really nice structured process with a beginning and an end which also of course reduces the risk of going out of scope and yes there's an iteration sprint and deliverable details I want to add exactly the design sprint is a series of workshops designed to brainstorm prototype test your ideas within five or four days or less there's lots of different versions you can actually hack it so I've had three hour sprints it really depends on what the problem is so you can think of it as a recipe of workshops in a specific schedule so what you can think of within are people, equipment and business challenges and users to test with so it's a really good framework and the nice thing about it as well is it's kind of already packaged isn't it Philip where you can just kind of be like hey this is what we do here's the book on it and what do you think yeah exactly so one of the nice things about it is that you can buy a design sprint the design sprint itself takes four days we do an iteration of three days there's a lot of prep work and the deliverable but what you're actually getting is the answer to your problem it'll cost 20, 30, 40, 50, 75 thousand euros that's it then all of a sudden how many people are working on it and it's like a person no it doesn't matter we've invested years in developing the design sprint and we have experts who are able to do this in such a short time period if you don't do a design sprint you'll probably mess around for yourself and it'll take you half a year before you realize the idea was stupid that we could have told you in four days so you're not really selling the hours you're selling the time reduction of half a year that would save a lot more than 20, 40, 50,000 euros right and there's specifically when to start it could be a new product or project to validate an idea quickly if you have limited time to deliver a prototype if your product team needs to get unstuck if you want to leverage new data and research it's always good to get a bunch of folks in the room if you want to actually show the team the benefits of user testing by actually bringing them into the process you can shortcut tackling a big problem there's so many benefits to this and what like I love the process so much and I'm a complete nerd and yeah it's great do you have any top tips for selling the design sorry the design sprint have you yourself sold it and what have you learned along that journey yeah yes and yes when I started I actually started with design sprints when it was in the original five days and when I started I was doing a longer assignment at a SaaS company actually who had a SaaS product and they said well we have one very big client and we would love to show them that we can do more than only the SaaS product which is a horrible example when we talk about productization but let's not go into that and they had that big client and they knew that he had or they had a very expensive problem or at least the question was I was at the design center it's costing us a lot of money but we don't know if it's good or bad which was like a really open situation and that said that was a great starting point to say well hey design sprint might be really interesting because we can actually explore that problem and give you some insights on what the options would be so yes I've been selling it a few things it's important if you want to do a design sprint by yourself it's very difficult because yes you would most likely need to be the facilitator and if you're the facilitator it will be very difficult to also contribute your own ideas so you would need at least another creative or a designer with you so I've been partnering with other freelancers as well therefore I'm also always looking for other creative freelancers in my network so if you're on LinkedIn at me exactly don't forget to add Chris and Jeremy as well so you really want to team up so you need a facilitator you need a designer and maybe the designer can do the prototype as well and if not you can get another prototyper but officially with a design sprint you can also create a PowerPoint in Keynote or a prototype in Keynote or PowerPoint so everyone should technically be able to do it but you want to have something pretty I think but that's my opinion yeah I would like to share some facilitation top tips of the design sprint if I may with this group for folks that maybe want to get into it or have done it before and they're like okay well how do I become a better facilitator in this situation right so okay here's Chris's top 10 tips and I'll try and you know sprinkle them as quick as possible okay so the first is focus on the big three ask questions write stuff and mind the clock that's really all you need to do right if you're feeling overwhelmed these are the basics ask questions write stuff mind the clock the second is get commitment in advance or don't do the sprint at all okay so if people are just going to walk in and out there's no point really the team is in the room for that specific amount of time and the decision maker needs to be there otherwise just don't do it the third is fake confidence it's super normal as a facilitator to be nervous you'll gain confidence over time but you need to project confidence in order for other folks to listen to what you say and the instructions the fourth is don't outsmart anybody you're there to be helpful rather than to be smart so sometimes a facilitator needs to step back and kind of it's the collective goal and not you saying because I'm right okay you're the guide and not the hero exactly exactly that's it you're the guide not the hero fifth is be energetic I mean you can artificially stimulate in any way you want to but you need to be positive energised you know like we are here number six is I learned the hard way regular breaks if you don't have regular breaks people are just going to like drift off because you're doing a lot of these activities that really require creativity so breaks seven is get reps the more you do it the better you come so if you haven't done it before offer to facilitate a meeting or a half day workshop baby steps to get there the eighth is don't take yourself too seriously I I always laugh at myself during these kind of things because why not it's only a bit fun and it's just a bunch of adults in a room using post-its why is it so serious right it's fine and then the ninth one is actually more tactical which is when you introduce an activity you should be thinking about the what, why and how for example quick example here hey everybody we're about to do how might we that's the what we're doing this to frame challenges into opportunities that's the why here's how we do it step one, step two, step three so what, why, how is a good facilitator trick and then the tenth is get feedback this is not only from your co-facilitator but also from the participants I like to use I wish and I like right things that went well I liked and I wish is like hey maybe you could have added this etc etc so those are the hot quick 10 tips Chris memorizes these every night he goes to bed we've been waiting for months to finally get this out but those are amazing and totally right Chris especially the feedback tip I would always include that also in your productization because when you're running a repeatable process or product of course get feedback always find ways to improve it because you're doing the same thing kind of sounds negative but find ways to improve it and make it even better exactly so yeah Jeremy snacks provide snacks make sure the snacks gotta have the snacks that's it yes you don't have the snacks snacks, water, coffee like just condiments to get those energy levels up right do we have any questions that spring to mind from the chat Jeremy we've got a couple of other follow up questions since you guys started talking about design sprints but they are not related to design sprints to you guys they're my productize questions we could answer some before we wrap I guess sure I think I have the time sorry I think that's a good deal I'm not talking about that there's a question from Richard Hill this is a little bit more of like a question round productizing but does it make sense to take your current service offering and simply package it up or is there is it not as simple as that how would you take your phrase of question and prepackage that to match your definition of what you would call productize it's a bit of a tough question because I don't know what exactly your service is but I think it's important so when I help freelancers create a freelancers to productize their service I go back to the beginning so I really think about who are you as a freelancer what are some of the skills that you have what are some of the experience that you really enjoyed what are some of the things you didn't enjoy and start with that so if you offer a service I would say what are you going to do and are you certain that that is the thing that you're passionate about if it's the case go on to the next step I would like to think on what problem does your product solve so you might say well okay I want to help or I know that in this specific industry or vertical or silo whatever I know that there is this problem and important problem people need to solve it urgently they need to solve it fast and they are willing to pay for solving that problem so you need to know also that there is in the market a place for what it is that you're doing and then finally it's thinking about what is your product how do you deliver it how do you package it how do you name it and if your current service checks all of those boxes you could maybe you need to cut it into smaller pieces so if you're a design thinking expert who normally does like projects that are three months and above I think that might be a bit much for a single product you might want to chop it into smaller pieces but I hope that even partially answered your question yeah alright we got one maybe something for some of the newer folks out there what are some successful strategies for how do they secure their first sale of a product let's not call it a client service let's call it like a sale and then selling ongoing products how do they go from that first sale to the ongoing sale yeah I would start with start as simple as possible I think I'd love to hear your opinion on this as well normally when we're starting out we feel like we need to be able to do everything right from from beginning all the way to the development and dev ops and what not but what if we what if you're a UX researcher so one of the things that I know is that there are a lot of companies who don't get fresh user insights every month and you don't need to be like a wireframe prototype UI UX expert validation head chief of development you just need to be able to have a conversation with people so I think like don't overthink it but make sure it's valuable and to get your first sale don't sell start connecting with people and simply talk about hey I've been talking to people in your industry I've heard that these are some of the problems that you're dealing with for example some of your competitors are saying they don't have plenty of fresh user research key insights whatever and I'd love to hear how you deal with it yeah well to be honest maybe we don't have it as well okay I understand that it might not even be that weird because it is pretty difficult right here are your pains so I've been thinking about how to solve that and then shut up don't talk wait and see how they respond if they say yeah exactly so okay well how does that work or how do we proceed from here well unfortunately I'm quite booked right now we wink but you know what let's just set an appointment send you off some information or I'm not a total sales guru if it's like if it's hot like if you can close it close it but I don't personally I hate the super American Wolf of Wall Street pushy sales thingy I always believe that if you have something valuable people understand where you're coming from and they truly believe that you can help them it will work out but that's my personal take on that but that's how I would do it keep it simple don't sell ask questions what about you Chris how is this for you yeah so to repeat the question Jeremy was it specifically around a service or could it be anything just how to get started yeah well this question I'll read it specifically it wasn't really about product it was more about freelancing but how does someone new to freelancing get their first project and then how do they subsequently continue to get more freelance work are you gonna hate me for this yeah no I mean like people are gonna hate me for this which is like oh do good work do it for free do it lots and lots of times no so I like just the personal story of mine which is when I wasn't a designer and I wanted to get paid for design I was like okay I could make Wix websites so let me just go on Facebook groups and ask people who wanted one and that's actually how my design career began so it was as simple as that and I had multiple conversations with people and someone I was lucky enough that someone or a startup was like okay you can do it and I charged next to nothing like it wasn't really worth my time but I enjoyed it and it kind of gave me the inkling that I wanted to do this for longer and do it more so when you're starting out you don't have the luxury of choice higher prices the best clients you just don't have that so for anyone starting out just local communities LinkedIn friends and family just do stuff for free and if you've done good work people will automatically recommend you right if you've given something why like reciprocity it's gonna come back and just keep doing that and I think that's what I would say and even though for me yes those folks did recommend me we did a couple of projects but I just started learning about this world and just try to get my hands as dirty as possible just real mucky up inside so I guess that's my experience what might be an addition to that Chris when I started my web design company one of the ways that we would sell it was actually to already design a homepage it's a great way to say well okay your current website looks I woke up this morning screaming after visiting your website yesterday so I couldn't help myself I made this redesign I'd love to help you with building a website like this but it's a nice conversation starter so even if you're already doing the work for free it's a good exercise and then maybe you can still try to sell it I'm sure there are a lot of people would indeed say like if you're good at something don't do it for free but if you're starting out you're starting out there you go exactly one example of that is exactly do what you do to get paid on Twitter and running a very profitable agency the guy actually roasted websites for free and he did this on Twitter, he did it on Indie Hacker and exactly what Philip was saying he just did it to do it right send some good vibes out there and eventually people knew him for that and then his business kind of picked up from all these let's just call them free work value added to the community and that just got his name out there so exactly to Philip's point I think it's so underrated free work but be strategic you don't want people to take advantage of you so there's a balance there isn't there yeah definitely alright we are a little bit over so I'm gonna wrap this up and just thanks everybody for tuning in it's been really really fun and of course thank you Philip is there anything you want to plug today I just want to say if these topics are the things that you're interested in and I kept an eye on the chat as well I think people got a lot of value from this I would say if you don't follow Chris and myself yet follow us connect with us on LinkedIn I think for both of us it's a platform super active on and if you want to hear me Jabron Moore on my website you can also visit it through my LinkedIn page don't worry the Dutch is not for everyone there's a free weekly newsletter in there in which I every week on Thursday send out my thoughts on these subjects and give actionable tips on how to build a scalable business amazing amazing and Jeremy thank you so much for being our moderator today course anytime my pleasure anytime I get to hang out with you too I'm going to do it please tell us about beyond UX and also your upcoming project oh yeah so I've got a podcast beyond UX design the podcast is really designers career shifters talking about the soft skills not necessarily hard skills not talking about prototypes and variables and things like that because there's more UX than design so we talk a lot about storytelling I've interviewed these two guys most you know collaboration relationships and all that stuff so if you're into that I think it's an entertaining show give it a listen beyond UXdesign.com oh upcoming things so I'm working on this new project called the cognition catalog and if you follow every Friday I post a new cognitive bias and I'm working on putting that together as an e-book in the short term longer term maybe some physical cards so this is going to be really useful not just for UX designers though this is more geared towards your team and how those biases affect a lot of decision making forward so you might dig it I don't know check it out cognitive what is it cognition.com if you want to check it out and thanks Chris Jeremy just before we go I need to hear your intro that you do in beyond UX what do you say what's the intro what's up UX fam how's your mom and them welcome to another episode beyond UXdesign I'm Jeremy I got Chris and Philip here hanging out today talking about all kinds of stuff that's it that's all I got how's your mom and them is my favorite that's so good alright guys okay love it love it thank you so much for tuning in we had a blast I'm Chris and check everything UXplaybook.org and we will see you next week and I believe I have Jeremy on so thank you again Philip yeah Philip you can you want to marry me next week yeah yeah yeah let's do it alright guys thank you so much see you later alright yeah that's great