Last updated · 26 March 2024

How we collaborate

If you are looking for an agency to work with and landed here, you are most certainly at the right place. A place which will shed light on what to expect while working with Significa.

However, if you're still unsure about which resourcing options to choose from — an agency, a freelancer, or to hire in-house — we've created an article to help you with that process: Should I hire in-house, an agency or a freelancer?

We are not always going to be the obvious or the cheapest choice. Far from it. We may not even be the right one for you. And when that's the case, we'll be transparent enough to let you know as early as possible.

Transparency.

Speaking of transparency, let's start there, shall we?

We aim to be as transparent as possible with our clients. The proof of which being the Billing and invoicing and our Client selection criteria pages, which keep our pricing model and our reasons for wanting to work with you wide open.

Our commitment is to keep you up to date with all progress, budget, and team allocation throughout the entirety of our relationship. We'll use Slack, Notion, and Linear to iterate and report the advancements of our work. You can check out more at Communication.

As early as our first call, we wish to cover your fit with our moral and ethical values and our financial suitability. If we see there isn't a fit, we will let you know straight away. We won't waste your time nor try to sell you something you'll be second-guessing throughout our collaboration. Instead, we'll always be direct and upfront.

In return, we expect our clients to be equally transparent with us. This two-sided transparent relationship is the only path to maximise the potential of our collaboration.

Trust.

We know you'll hire us to get you the results, risk-free. We know you'll hire us to get the best possible product, even clinching a few awards here and there. We know you'll hire us for this transparent process of ours and the dedication we put into your product. We know you expect great things. We thrive on these expectations. We really do!

However, the only way to achieve greatness is through collaboration based on trust. Trust should be the key expectation for both parties. We must trust one another. We want you to trust our work and to let us manage our process. We don't expect you to attempt to micro-manage our team. It will prove absolutely counter-productive. Trust us: we will deliver.

We know it is your financial investment, quite a big one sometimes, and we understand you want to be kept on par with what's happening. Don't worry, you will. That's part of our fully transparent, accountable way of working: you will always be involved, invited to iterate, and kept up to date with anything and everything we're doing.

Collaboration.

We work a little differently from many agencies. Whilst the project manager will be your primary point of contact, we encourage our designers and developers to iterate directly with you, either through Slack or regular meetings.

We believe that the personal contact between both sides is invaluable. On the one hand, it gives our team members a deeper understanding of your decisions, your rationale, and your motivations. On the other hand, it gives you a direct line of communication with the team, avoiding the broken-phone-like loss of information.

We see our collaboration as one team rather than a divisive collaboration between us and the client. You’ll also be part of the process as if you were a member of Significa. We expect the opposite to happen.

In addition, you should never expect yes-people when working with Significa. As stated in our Culture, clients aren’t always right, nor are we. We are not design or code-monkeys who merely execute what we are asked to. We will always own our critical-thinking to exchange ideas, opinions, data, and facts that will produce better outcomes.

Quality.

We preach quality in everything we do. It guides every single principle of our existence. We focus our energy on asking why, how and for whom we're building things.

Every aspect of working with us must revolve around delivering the best possible product, which means taking no shortcuts.

Design-led.

We are design-led. In other words, and quite simply put, we don't take on projects we don’t design.

We value design so much, we've put so much effort into perfecting the art of creating excellent interfaces, and we've invested so much in enhancing the handover between our design and our development teams that we don't feel comfortable implementing someone else's design.

We can't fathom the possibility of compromising the quality of our development output by implementing anything but projects we designed in the first place. Don't get us wrong, but it probably won't reach our standards.

Pace.

If you choose to work with us, you must expect a highly iterative, fast-paced project. We will never go away for a month or two, keeping you in the dark, only to come back with a bunch of stuff to review.

That's profoundly counter-productive and inefficient. Alternately, especially during the design phase, we will keep on pushing you for feedback, discussions, and small iterations to keep things manageable and focused.

We prefer to iterate over small things multiple times than over one large cluster, or even clutter, at once. We are really good at designing interfaces, but your insights and knowledge about your product will be invaluable to drive us forward. The best products are a result of our shared knowledge.

During the development phase, the pace of iterations will drop a bit unless your team is also involved in the coding as well. In that case, the pace will remain up there due to code reviews and pull requests.

Tailor-made.

We don't use off-the-shelf or template solutions. We don't do no-code or low-code projects. We build everything from scratch, tailor-made with a clear mission: to deliver the best quality possible.

By quality, we mean an exceptional user experience based on principles of scalability and sustainability. We mean sustainable software, as in it won't consume a lot of resources to maintain.

Picture this: if you had a wine production company, would you buy a template label for your wine bottles? No, because it would be generic. It could fit every other company, put you on the same bucket as them, and not set you aside from anybody else on a crowded supermarket shelf. Instead, you would certainly have designers craft unique labels.

The same principle applies to the products we build. We build them to fit you and you alone. One where every unique design decision and every single line of code is made with you in mind.

At this point, you may be thinking: “Well, I don't care about how it's done. If an off-the-rack option solves the exact same problem as a custom-made solution does, I don't mind”.

You are correct: it solves your immediate problem. But being thought-out from the ground up, tailor-made, prepared, and set up to your goals and ambitions enables us to define and structure the product to maximise its scalability, flexibility, resilience, and sustainability looking into the future.

We don't want to build one-offs. We want to build products based on a solid foundation that will allow you to grow and scale from there.

Modularity.

One of the key aspects of a scalable, flexible, resilient, and sustainable product (and we speak from experience) is its modularity.

With us, you can rest assured this won't be an issue, mostly because both Design (Design System) and Development will be 100% like LEGO. In other words, with LEGO, you're always assured any piece will fit any other piece, regardless of where and when you've bought it.

Teams.

First and foremost, we don't rent out people. We are not a body-leasing company. When you hire us, you don't hire John, Claude, Anna, or whoever person it may be. Instead, you hire the shared knowledge of Significa.

When you hire us, you'll get a dedicated team of people who will help you beyond the extra manpower we can provide you with. We will think, we will question, and we will always try to make it better. That's our commitment.

As you can see from our Billing and invoicing page, we don't bill on a per-person basis, which implies we also don’t make single allotments of one person per project. Instead, we bill in Packages of people which always have at least 3 Significa team members. Soon to be part of your team, too.

Each Package comprises technical resources (1 or more), a Project Manager, and a Delivery Manager.

The technical resources (the designers, the developers, the illustrators, the motion designers, etc) will always be fully allocated to a project. We don't do partial allocations of half-days or weeks in and weeks out. Once focused on your project, they won't be jumping in and out to do some part-time gig at another client's project. For us to deliver absolute maximum quality, they have to live and breathe your project. Be fully engaged with it. Dividing focus and jumping between multiple ones will undoubtedly hinder productivity, commitment, and the ability to maximise the quality of the results.

On the flip side, Project and Delivery managers will be partially allocated. In contrast with the technical resources, these don't need to be fully allocated at all times. It would actually be a waste of time and money. Their allocation is measured based on the project's size.

Why is a project manager needed?

Simply put, the Project Manager reduces the risk of the project by a whopping 83%. We know this for a fact because we compared the data from our current projects with previous ones (before mandatorily having a Project Manager on board). 83% of the projects today are delivered on time and on budget, without ever being in a burning state.

The project manager takes care of planning, coordinating and allocating the team, documenting the project, syncing weekly with clients, reporting progress made, and tracking budget and time, among other things you would expect from a project manager.

Project managers are indispensable for a well-functioning, transparent collaboration. It shouldn't be the designers’ and developers’ responsibility to do the aforementioned tasks while also trying to deliver an exceptional product.

Why is a delivery manager needed?

You are probably aware of our commitment to quality. You probably read about it in our Client selection criteria, our Playbook, our Mission and values, or in many other places throughout this Handbook.

Quality extends beyond the output of our designers and developers or the proficiency of our project managers. We aim at exceptional quality for every deliverable across the project. Our delivery manager is responsible for ensuring quality at every single step of the way, from the most “insignificant” iteration to market research and user testing sessions. From every design file that is handed over to developers to the quality assurance made before every release train.

The delivery manager is our final filter of quality. A really fine filter.

Oh, and one more thing: if your team is taking on the development side of the project, we will also do quality assurance, looking to preserve the standard of quality we wish every final product to have.

Estimates.

As stated in Billing and invoicing, which we paraphrase below, we don't work with fixed budgets. Instead, all quotations and timelines are created around estimates.

Even though our commitment with you is to attempt to deliver every project on time and on budget, you know as well as we do that product development and software projects are prone to changes in scope, unexpected occurrences related to strategy, technology, and a lot of iterations that can extend timelines and, as a consequence, budget.

We won't go deep into this option of ours on this page. However, we've written a dedicated entry in this Handbook about the matter. Should be about a 5-minute read and can be found at Why estimates.

Billing.

We've created an entry in this Handbook fully dedicated to billing that can be found at Billing and invoicing.

However, something about it is deeply connected with the ethos of working with us but not as much with the actual financials of it: we don't track time.

We don't do such a thing because we don't sell time. Kind of in line with not selling manpower, as stated above in The Teams. Instead, we sell the deliverables you get, the results we achieve together, and the quality we are known for. Packages are just the best, most straightforward way of billing for all these things.

Legal things.

We like our contracts signed and our upfront payment invoices taken care of before any project starts. Understandable, no?

For that reason, we've got a page fully dedicated to it: Steps to get a project started.