What did agency life teach you?
Share link- Visitor
What did agency life teach you?
- John
Range, and a low tolerance for gold-plating. Before Rapha I spent eight years freelance and agency-side. At AnalogFolk I built web applications and hardware prototypes for AkzoNobel and Lucozade, including Dulux MixLab, an in-store paint mixing and colour-picking device, and consolidated 14 AkzoNobel brand and service sites onto a single platform. At Harkable I built digital campaigns for Nike Foundation, Paramount Pictures, IGN, Warner Music and Penguin Books. Every brief was a different industry with a different idea of what good looked like.
- Visitor
That is consumer and campaign work. Anything more demanding?
- John
Fathom London, where I built production financial applications: a mobile trading platform for commodity and forex trading at Goldman Sachs, a risk management platform for Access Fintech used by banks and buy-side firms to monitor the trade lifecycle, and an internal platform for Commerzbank to manage client terms. Then through my own company I built online car configurators for Audi and SEAT at Digitas UK. Financial services teaches you what correctness costs; automotive teaches you what a premium experience costs.
- Visitor
How does any of that help you run technology at a cycling brand?
- John
It is where the breadth comes from. Agency work means shipping for people whose business you had to learn quickly, so I got used to understanding a domain well enough to make a pragmatic call rather than a safe one. That is still how I work: I would rather make the right-sized decision than the impressive one. And the Rapha job itself started as an agency-style contract in April 2018, delivering the new platform, before it became the permanent role.