A business nobody could explain
in one sitting.
CSC ServiceWorks runs laundry and air services across tens of thousands of locations. The model is genuinely complicated — property owners, residents, route technicians and payment all move differently — and every new employee, and every investor, had to have it explained from scratch by somebody senior.
The situation,as it arrived.
A business that takes an hour of a senior person's time to explain is a business that scales its own bottleneck. Training depended on the explainer being available, so it happened late and unevenly.
The same problem showed up in front of investors. A model that has to be talked through is a model being taken on trust, and the parts that make it defensible were the parts that got skipped for time.
Meanwhile the mobile and web applications were adding features faster than anyone was defining how they should look or behave, which is how a product accumulates four versions of the same button.
Four moves,in the order they happened.
Draw the business before designing anything
Hundreds of custom illustrations and diagrams built to explain how the model actually works. Not decoration on a slide: the visual vocabulary the company now uses to describe itself internally.
Turn the explanation into a tool
An internal training prototype that carries the illustrations and the content strategy together, so a new employee is walked through the business by the tool rather than by whoever is free that week.
The same argument, for investors
An investor storytelling prototype: the model, the economics and the moat in a sequence that holds without a narrator, because the parts that get cut for time are the parts that matter most.
A design system, so the product stops diverging
A component and pattern system for the mobile and web applications, which is what turns each new feature into an application of existing decisions rather than a fresh set of them.
Then keep designing against it
New user journeys and features designed into the system on an ongoing basis, with roadmap strategy alongside — four years in, the system is the reason the tenth feature costs less to design than the second.
Everything thatleft the building.
- Design system for mobile and web
- Product design across new journeys and features
- Product roadmap strategy
- Hundreds of custom illustrations and diagrams
- Internal training prototype
- Investor storytelling prototype
- Email marketing
- Campaign landing pages
- Lead generation
More like this one.One a month.
Written out of engagements rather than off a content calendar, by whichever principal ran the work. No sequence afterwards.
Your situation is not this one.Tell us what it is.
A senior strategist reads it and replies within one business day, with a straight answer about whether we are the right people.