We spent months mapping every hour inside an agency. What we found changed how we think about everything.
A while back I spent a few months inside a US agency, mapping where the work actually went. Every task, every handoff, every hour. It was a bit obsessive, if I’m honest.
By the end, a content team that used to run on 70 people was turning out the same work with nine.
I told that story in an online session last week and it seemed to strike a nerve, so I’m sharing the full deck here for anyone who wanted it.
Most of the agency leaders I talk to don’t really have a tool problem. They’ve got the subscriptions, the trials, the working group that met twice. What they haven’t got is a decision about where to start. That’s the actual problem, and it’s the one the session tries to solve.
The way I’ve come to think about it is that every agency now needs two roadmaps, and hardly any have either.
The first is about how you work. You map the work, score it for impact and effort, and rank it into something you actually build against. It’s the same discipline any decent SaaS team already lives by, just pointed at agency delivery instead of a product backlog. That’s the bit that took 70 down to nine, and it started with a roadmap rather than a round of redundancies.
The second is about what you sell. Most agencies are sitting on years of hard-won process, refined across dozens of clients, and never think of it as an asset. It usually is one. I talk through how we took our own and turned it into a piece of software.
Holding both together is an idea I keep coming back to, which is loops. The smallest repeatable bit of work that actually produces something a client values, built once and improved every time it runs. People compound slowly and expensively. Loops compound quickly and cheaply. That gap is most of the story.
It finishes with a plain 90-day plan, because none of it counts for much if it just stays on a slide.
It’s also a bit of a taster. I’m giving a keynote at the Agency Hackers Ibiza Summit later this year called SaaS Is Coming For Your Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, and a fair bit of the thinking here is where that talk starts from. This is the calmer, more practical version. Ibiza gets the sharper edge.
Deck’s below. If it’s useful, brilliant. If you think I’ve got any of it wrong, tell me, I’d rather have the argument.
Slides: How Will AI Change the Way Agencies Deliver Work? (Agency Hackers Webinar)
You can view the slides from the webinar below:
