This year feels genuinely like a crossroads in the worlds of creativity, technology, experience design and development. The air is rife with speculation, highlights, insights and learnings as ever at this time of the year.   After yet another year of rapid innovation and continued painful disruption in the digital world, maybe we need a bit of collective therapy - maybe more than usual!

We’ve put together our own thoughts on 2024, with a particular focus on the people and teams who work broadly in the digital experience area.  A few musings on how we’ve got “here” this year, and why we think that what got us here isn’t going to get us “there”.

The Big Shakeup

We launched Raven in November 2024 , right into what is now looking like a hard reset and transformation of product design, experience design, service design and UX (choose your nomenclature!).  

Of course, this particular shaking of the tree hasn’t just happened during 2024 - it’s been running its course and through its rinse cycle for some time now.  Certainly, we can track the root causes of the disruption back for some distance.  

We are not done with this  cycle either - we’d expect effects and impacts to rumble on in 2025, but hopefully with a little less drama and pain.  Things ARE showing signs of recovery and positive momentum, but there will be no return to “normal”.  Everything is changing and has changed.

If we had the power of time travel and were able to look back on this period, we’d lay odds that it will be defined as  a new industrial revolution, a period as important as other tech-led revolutions in human history.  

Common to all revolutions it’s been a time of real confusion, a borderline feeling of chaos and a huge disruption to working practices.  This has already started  flipping accepted product and service norms, up-ending established strategies, challenging design and development competencies and causing a dramatic shake-up in previously in-demand roles and jobs.  Some of this has been incredibly painful to those who find themselves out of work.  

Of course, though many have been warning the industry for some time that “it” was coming, just as many have been surprised or caught out by the velocity of the impact.

Root causes

It’s difficult to pinpoint one simple explanation of how we’ve got here, in many ways the perceived malaise in the industry is a bit of a perfect storm - everything, all at once -  but we do think there’s  a number of contributing factors we can logically identify:

• The over-indexing on competitive hiring over the past 10 years by the major tech  platforms.

• Rusted-in approaches in design teams - often preserving silo-thinking and vertical approaches to competency development and career progression.

• The rapid promotion of senior (and sometimes junior) talent to director-level positions without the foundations of hard-won experience or an infrastructure to support the development of their leadership competencies.

• The mass-appending of “product” to strategy, design and development roles, again, often without the foundations of product leadership or product ownership experience.

• A building perception (right or wrong) that investment in design thinking, resources and capabilities hasn’t delivered a great return.

• A misalignment of company and personal purpose.

• A lack of investment in team health, including understanding  psychological dynamics in teams, nurturing team culture and blend, and very little focus on building resilience in teams and individuals.

• A lack of focus on competency development and career development path to keep pace with emerging technology and working practice.

• A stubborn bias to project management and burn type metrics rather than a coaching and empowerment approach to delivery and team effectiveness - this despite widespread adoption of Lean and Agile frameworks and approaches.

• An investment in generic wellbeing support but lack of investment in embedding wellbeing support in daily action, practice, method and expectations of delivery. 

• A global pushback on DE&I in the media and as company investment.

• The relentless cadence of restructures and seeing friends and colleagues let go and established team communities broken up.

• Lack of investment in building team understanding of commercial imperatives

• The acceleration of AI application, adoption and investment.

• Political, economic, societal and environmental anxiety.

The old worlds of strategy, design and development are being forced to adapt rapidly.  The norms of “what good looks like” - in terms of product and service design and development, customer engagement approaches, team shapes, skills, competencies and working environment - are changing before our eyes.  

This cycle will naturally have winners and losers, and without a doubt we will all need to adjust the way we work - and focus on what we all need to do next.  

If that all sounds existential, then you’re right, it is.    

What are we seeing?

At Raven, we have seen some very consistent themes emerging this year.  This is backed up by feedback from our Raven expert network and from our clients.  We can break the themes down as follows:

• Morale & wellbeing in decline

• Rapid change in the in-demand role types

• AI integration stress

• The rise of the collectives

Morale & wellbeing in decline

• Morale and general wellbeing in product and service teams is suffering or declining.

• There’s poor recognition of the value of design within business. 

• There’s a general lack of  investment in team health, working environment and culture.

• There’s a general lack of investment in career progression and competency development.

• Perceptions that diversity and inclusion focus is being dialled back or out.

• There’s general uncertainty and a level of underlying anxiety even in unaffected teams.

• Increased levels of workload, stress, burnout, and some more extreme mental health challenges.  

• A priority on survival  - “I’m keeping my head down until the market improves”.  

• At a leadership level there’s concern that there’s a high risk of significant churn in talent as the market picks up.

A cursory look at LinkedIn and Reddit will testify! 

This is not an unusual situation right now - and we are seeing its impact everywhere - across established design teams in the product, UX, brand and marketing functions of major brands, and in the service (agencies & consultancies) side of the coin. 

It’s a challenging and unhappy time for many who are now experiencing long periods of unemployment or the pain of redundancy.

This situation directly undermines culture and team cohesion, leading to a misalignment of team and company purpose, reduction in proaction, lack of open and honest feedback, and a lack of engagement and innovation.  

It’s also forcing a wholesale re-evaluation of career path, nature of work and personal purpose.

We are seeing it every day, it’s industry wide - and it’s actually quite heartbreaking.

Rapid change in the in-demand role types 

We are seeing a continued shift away from the traditional product and service design hierarchies and rigid role types into increasingly hybrid titles and competencies.

Let’s have a look at just a few profiles that we are seeing start to proliferate:

• Growth Designers - product designers with a number of years of experience in building products. There’s a focus here on defining desired outcomes, setting hypotheses and running experiments and validation exercises, improving user journeys, flows, and systems, identifying and recommending improvements.

• Product Activation Leads - another hybrid, blending the more typical product management competencies with marketing, campaign and core design competencies.

• AI Product Managers - confirming how pervasive AI application development and toolsets are becoming.

• Design Engineers - designers with strong coding skills basically - reinforcing the lack of demand for designers who’ve stayed in a very specific UI/UX swim lane for example.

Even in roles where the nomenclature hasn’t yet caught up - Product Manager, Strategist, Design Lead, Product Designer for example - the shift in expectation towards deeper experience and broader competency is dramatically apparent.

This shift is consistent with a general pushback on the more “traditional” design roles in UI and UX, and is also  in common with a pressing need for teams that have broader competencies and far deeper, “lived” product and service experience.  

These broader and experience-based skillsets are perceived as more useful and valuable right now.  To an extent it’s a return to what we used to call “T-Shapes”, but more broadly it’s an indication that there’s been an oversupply of the more traditional designer types, a lack of product “battle scars” and an over-reliance on silo disciplines.  

There’s still room for deep specialism of course, but the expectation on specialists is moving to mastery and the working mode is more typically  contract and freelance, as the skills more naturally fall into supply/demand type project needs, rather than full-time capability. 

There’s a distinct smell of unicorn in some of these emerging role profiles to be honest, and we are seeing an associated  expansion (or explosion!) in the “must-haves” lists on advertised roles.  These multi-skilled and highly experienced people certainly do exist, they are out there - but the number of people on the market with relevant, provable experience is massively outnumbered by the glut of people hunting work.  

This is also illuminated in general feedback from candidates that interview approaches and processes are getting far more direct, with a focus on performance and results, less inclined to explore candidate background and “fit”, and much more demanding of the full advertised list of competencies.

AI integration stress

We don’t think AI should be considered a separate application category anymore - design and development tools across the board are accelerating AI integration and features.  

But for all the benefits we are gaining in speed and efficiency, there’s also a parallel acceleration of expectations on deliverables and output - efficiency and speed in, workload up.  

This is also adding to product and service design teams’ sense of pressure, urgency and stress about AI, whether that’s FONKU (Fear Of Not Keeping Up) or FOLO (Fear Of Losing Out).  2 new (ish) acronyms you probably really didn’t need!

There’s also  no longer a need to do highly manual analysis of qualitative data, or do continuous rounds of customer interviews to gather opinion or feedback, and this is definitely affecting the research disciplines.  This is highly contentious and debatable of course, but like it or not, the role of research in product and service design and development is radically shifting away from people talking to people, or having to piece together meaning from distributed user feedback or competing research approaches.

The rise of the collectives

On the service side of the market, the trend seems to be to go bigger, right?  The Omnicom and IPG merger is yet another consolidation that attempts to rationalise the idea that scale is what the world needs.  That merger is one of many.  However, these huge mergers disguise another mass of layoffs in the service of efficiencies.

The likely reality of scale at that level is that clients will actually lose choice, costs will rise, and client businesses will be disrupted.  The wider impact on the service industries is that the race to the bottom continues.  We’ve already seen that happen at the production end of the market, and the promise of the giants is that they offer a strategic and creative powerhouse.  

The truth is, bigger isn’t necessarily better.  If anything, technology is making it easier for smaller to be bigger as AI enables agencies to do more with less.

Also, there is plenty of “small” out there, doing amazing work without fuss.  There's a host of excellent indie and passionate boutique agencies pushing the boundaries of creativity with real heart and purpose every day.  There’s also a world of individuals with stellar levels of experience and expertise who simply don’t like living in the matrix.  Last but not least there’s a freelance market of brilliant specialists who do it because it better suits their life circumstances, responsibilities and availability. 

This has all been supplemented en masse by the flood of layoffs this year and last - forcing many, not through choice, to return to the market as contractors, interims, fractionals and freelancers.  

Many are also being forced to re-evaluate the services they can offer, and are essentially retooling their skills, their proposition and their purpose.

This makes a new (old) model possible and attractive - the collective.  

A collective is a group of practitioners  who work together toward a common goal, usually under their own management.  People in a collective are often united by a shared set of beliefs, aesthetics, or unique takes on the world. Collectives can also assemble out of pure pragmatic motivation - like seeking and winning work together.

Collectives can:

• Create change

• Build pipeline and win work

• Build a support network

• Stay lean without the typical company infrastructure and costs

• Create something larger than the sum of its parts

A number of small collectives have sprung up over the past few years, and we see this trend continuing.

Raven’s Talent Network has aspects of a collective.  We have built, and will continue to build, a global network of complementary talent in the product, service and experience space that will always be a greater set of collective skills than those of us founders.  

Our role is to create opportunity for the people who join us, and to lean on them to collaborate with us to unpack client problems.  

But this isn’t an exclusive relationship.  Our network is free to work with whoever they please.  We are also keen to have other collectives in our network and supplement this with partners who offer specific services.  

This way we can offer a force multiplier effect to our clients - who get access to a much more flexible and authentic creative powerhouse - and to our network - who get another route to market for their services, opportunities to collaborate at scale, and a community to meet, learn from and  do projects with.  Ultimately our business will stand or fall based on the strength of our network and the skills in its community.

We are laying a strong bet that versions of the collective model will continue to challenge the accepted agency/consulting model in 2025 - offering clients more choice, increased opportunities for creativity and innovation and access to top-tier talent -  and offering expert practitioners and small teams more opportunities to work on exciting projects and initiatives.

So what should we be focusing on in 2025? 

Our biggest advice for the new year would be to positively snap out of survival mode and start to unpack opportunities for growth - in self, in teams, and in business.  The mantra of “survive til 25” is going to be as old in 3 weeks time as that threadbare Christmas Tree.

If we are in the middle of a new industrial revolution, then the pain caused by disruption will be matched a hundred times more by the opportunity - to innovate, to collaborate, to change up a gear, to rethink and reinvent, to find magic, to make a difference.  

We’ve outlined a few things to focus on asap - broken down by Product & Service Talent, and by Business.

Product & Service Design Talent

Develop your commercial skills

• Customer & User Purpose and Business Purpose are both important to you, your development and your value.  

• Develop a heightened awareness of both as part of your toolset and learn how to balance them in your work.

Understand the organisation

• Whether you are part of an existing business or you are interviewing for a new one, get under the skin of the strategy and roadmap, understand what the business challenges are.

• Customer experience will be a constant at the heart of all of this, and your ability to apply experience improvement to the goals of the business will be a measure of your success.

Move yourself beyond craft and task

• Your mastery of your discipline is what got you HERE, it won’t be enough to get you THERE.

• Get yourself past the UI, the service blueprint, the journey map and the Figma prototype and find opportunities for magic, insight, innovation, and influence.

• Yours is a highly valuable voice and you are an instrument of positive change, but you will need to communicate in value terms, not just output terms.  

• You should absolutely prioritise mastery of your craft, but helping the organisation develop business concepts, ideas, human-centricity, insight and differentiation will make you even more valuable.

Think in terms of your impact, not just your deliverables

• Sure, you are being measured for “what it says on the label of your tin” - but if you can prove the impact of your work beyond simply delivering it at quality and on time, then you will be highly valued and noticed.

• You are not your backlog.

Be constantly curious, learning and developing

• Your time is always at a premium, but find ways to squeeze learning and competency development into your day or week.

• Very specifically, experiment and play with AI. Start building this into lived experience, not theory.  Whatever you do, don’t avoid this, or be like Canute trying to hold back the tide.

• Be interested in expanding yourself and what you do and treat “being interested” as a competency.  Don’t rely on being fed or coached.  If that’s happening, great, but treat it like a luxury, and work on yourself.

• Forge alliances and build networks and collectives.  There is power in numbers and having helpful buddies and people who help expand your mind and your knowledge, as well as creating opportunity.

Business

Helping our clients develop their teams, culture, working environment and practice is core to what we do.   

Addressing the “team mojo” challenges we’ve outlined in this article is going to be key to success in 2025 and will differentiate the more progressive businesses who are as concerned with experience, talent and culture as they are about profit. 

At Raven, we collectively have decades of experience developing this focus to positive effect, through our collective track-record in leadership roles within global, highly matrixed organisations, as well as leading design businesses and product companies.

In our experience, investing in the following areas will have a serious positive impact on both your  teams and your business - a win-win:  

Build Resilience 

• Building resilience in your organisation and in your teams next year is our primary recommendation.

• A way to define Resilience is “the ability to fly higher, more often, and more confidently”. 

• There are times when we all feel that things are going well - work and life feel “easy”, we feel positive or “up”. These are periods of Flow.  

• Flow is often not recognised in the moment it’s happening, but when we are looking back in reflection - we say “those were good days”, or “that was a great year”.  

• There are also periods when everything feels like it’s tough going - we feel “low” or “down”.  Things get on top of us and it feels hard to break out and get back to the good feeling.   

• So if challenging situations or periods of adversity force you “down”, resilience gives you the ability to bounce back, stronger - and move “up”.  

• The ability to recover quickly is a valuable discipline.  To get into flow more often is a valuable superskill.

• There is a great deal of physical and mental science behind the resilience concept.  

• In the past this has most often been used to help individuals, in therapy or coaching - but resilience has been moving out of a focus on self and into a focus on teams and business for some time now, because of its positive benefits and impact on results.   

• Put simply, the application of resilience training in business helps to build happier, more united and mutually supportive teams, and stronger and more cohesive organisations, reversing the negative impact of uncertainty and adversity, building wellbeing and improving focus and performance.  

• It’s also something your people will find useful, directly actionable and valuable both in and out of work.  

• A simple staged approach to getting started with Resilience:

  • Step 1: Build awareness of how to build resilience at individual, team and business levels.

  • Step 2: Understand the range of  Resilience improving techniques that can be applied in various contexts (eg real-world applications and approaches).

  • Step 3: Build teams their own context-based, action-oriented toolkit - this will  directly develop measurable improvement, daily practice and application. This toolkit would typically include elements like techniques to bust stress, improve health, and achieve a  high-performance state - “flow” -  more often.

  • Step 4: Check in, provide ongoing top-up support, and encourage practice and open feedback.  Build resilience “muscle”.

Align Purpose

• Your company’s purpose and values should not be relegated to a poster or something to read on your website.

• Deployed effectively, purpose is deeply understood by everyone who works in the business.  Everyone should feel able to identify with it and articulate it in real terms - for example, what this means to me and how I apply it in my work.

• Applied this way, purpose becomes a force multiplier and drives team cohesion, feelings of belonging, and being part of something greater than oneself.

• At Raven, we’ve found that building company purpose into the operation builds morale, aids resilience, reduces churn, and attracts new talent.

• In times of change and disruption, an alignment of personal and company values can make the difference between staying and going.

• Going beyond team, purpose should be considered, and apparent, in the design and development of your products and services - generations of customers are now considering a company’s purpose and values as key buying criteria.

Define and action improvements in the working environment

• If you want people back in the office fulltime, then make the environment work for that context .

• If you are running something more hybrid, then consider the different modes people need to be in.

• If you are running a fully distributed operation, then consider how to build in culture, interaction and support, and the home working environment.

• In other words, this is all about the different contexts of work mode and designing the working environment to suit.

• Technology and interior design are your friends here.

Make iterative improvements to delivery methods and approaches

• There’s nothing more frustrating for teams than making changes to teams, team shapes and role types and then operating an outmoded delivery model.

• “This is how we do things here” is your enemy!

• The key here is to co-design this with your team and ensure that this includes your strategy, design, development and delivery people as a collaboration.

• Being flexible is key here, as well as taking an interactive approach to rolling in changes.

• To consider the organisation as the product is a useful way of testing more progressive ways of working and new supportive tooling  - test, learn, iterate.

Integrate coaching approaches 

• Coaching is a delivery model that focuses on helping people achieve their goals by using their own capabilities. 

• Project managers are often isolated in solving problems and have to come up with answers to questions they have never encountered before. 

• An Agile Coach acts more as a mentor and facilitator, empowering the team to work in a self-organised way.

• This allows for a more proactive squad-type model for delivery, supporting team development, positive working habits and rituals, developing an open feedback culture and improving team decision-making and proaction.

Improve career development paths  

• Give your  team more visibility of their potential futures and help focus on key areas of positive self-development.

• This is good for building diversity and inclusion, retention, engagement and satisfaction, as well as a more informed approach to competency development

Focus on competency development 

• Identify gaps in current capabilities.

• Break down silo-thinking and any limiting “ladders” and “ceilings” and filling team and individual skills gaps.

• Allow for sideways and horizontal attainment and progression, bucking the more traditional vertical progress.

• In itself, this focus allows the growth of people and teams with broader  and more complementary skills.

• Key to this focus is making attainment and progress more transparent, as well as supporting with regular development dialogue, over and above the annual or quarterly performance dialogue type approaches.

Give the gift of time

• The timesheet approach to understanding effort is as old as factories, and probably as unpopular!

• While useful to understand how time is spent, and for service-based agencies like agencies and consultancies are the foundation of accounting and billing, they can feel like a form of tyranny, and at best a blunt tool.

• Understand how team time is spent and then reset expectations on time available in the contexts of wider objectives than burn metrics and utilisation. 

• We would advise deliberately building in room for team development, competency development, inspiration, innovation and a culture of experimentation and proaction.

• Easier said than done, but organisations that do this naturally tend to be more innovative, creative and have happy, more engaged teams.

Measure the “right” things

• Inline with the above, we strongly advise building in more flexible performance models and measures that include team cohesion, well-being and resilience.

Make Diversity & Inclusion actionable 

• Ah, this is justifiably a bigger topic than this end of year note allows, however, we think it’s important not to move backwards on this as things reshape and reset.

• Without getting into the political arguments, and the pushback that seems to be playing out globally, we prefer to focus on a fundamental truth - diverse teams build products, services and experiences that are more inclusive and cater for more diverse audiences, customers and users.  This goes for businesses too.

• For us this has always been more about recognising that fundamental truth and actively building an authentic culture and operation, than ticking boxes and rolling out mandates, commitments and policies.  Actions speak louder than words and commitments.

• Part of the overall feeling of pushback gets hidden behind people who are pushing ideology and agenda.  But the fact is that some of the pushback comes from a perfectly natural feeling that it’s all about handbooks and statements, and not about actually doing it, and keeping the faith through showing positive progress.  

• So we would advocate for a focus on actions in order to build a more diverse and inclusive culture that feels authentic and helpfully applied.

Happy Holidays!

Ok, so 2024 has been a ride, without doubt.   If you're feeling a bit exhausted, you're not alone. The digital world has been spinning faster than ever, and keeping up has been no small feat.

But here's the thing - beneath all the uncertainty and change, there's something pretty awesome brewing. Think of this moment like a giant reset button. Yes, things have been tough. Teams have been reshuffled, roles have shifted, and AI has been changing the game faster than we can say "machine learning". But that doesn't mean we should be afraid. It means we get to be creative.

Imagine this as our chance to level up. Maybe we'll learn a new skill, explore a different way of working, or see our jobs from a totally fresh perspective. The professionals who'll shine aren't those who resist change, but those who surf the wave with resilience, curiosity and enthusiasm.

For anyone feeling stressed or overwhelmed, take a deep breath. The seasonal break is your time to reset, reflect, and get excited about the possibilities. 2025 isn't about just surviving - it's about exploring, connecting, and discovering what you're truly capable of.  As you head into the seasonal break, take heart. The future isn't something that happens to us - it's something we actively shape. 

Here's to a great 2025 - may you solve puzzles, pick locks and find hidden treasure!

The Ravens x

Scott, Louise, Sam & Ed