From Vendor to Partner: Getting the Most Out of your Agency Relationship

Tanesha Smith-Wattley at UXDX USA. Video: https://youtu.be/m350x7JomMQ

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Consultant mythbusters

[00:00:11] Tanesha: Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. I'm so excited to bring this topic to you today. It sounds like it's very near and dear to some of our hearts, because everybody loves consultants. And you either know what that is or you don't, based on how old or how young you are, so laugh accordingly. But no matter who I spoke to when I announced my speaker topic, whether it was someone in-house or someone on the agency side, there was equal excitement to get this sorted out: "Oh, please do talk about that, because we need to get that sorted out." People on both sides of the aisle, so to speak, have a great interest in settling this topic, because not all agencies are terrible, but all people have had terrible experiences with agencies. So we will look into that together.

[00:01:04] We'll play a quick round of mythbusters, if you will indulge me, with number one at the top of the list: "They probably want to steal my job." Mind you, before we go down the line: I have spent just as much time in-house as on the agency side, so these are things I've thought myself, or things I've said myself, or heard as we were onboarding a new agency. Most consultants like consulting for the variety it provides. So use the benefit of their many reps, of having done it lots of times before, to fast-track your productivity and validate your ideas. They work for you, after all. Use the benefit of the many, many times they've done this and apply it to your specific circumstance.

[00:01:54] "What if they make me look bad in front of my boss?" I think that's a fair concern. What I would say to that is: we want you to look good. Cultivating a great relationship with you is about you in the future. I'm assuming you're not going to retire from your current job. You're going to move on, you're going to go to different companies, your network's going to grow. If we trip you up, make you look bad, try to show you up in front of your boss, you're never going to come calling to us again. We want to have a relationship with you so we can grow with you.

[00:02:32] "Won't they just toss around a bunch of buzzwords to sound smart?" Yes. However, great partners get into your groove, aligning to and respecting your language, your acronyms, your culture. Back to that variety piece: one of my favorite things about consulting is learning all y'all's little acronyms, your GTMs and your AOVs. I love it. It's so interesting to me. So we want to learn your language and get in the groove.

[00:03:08] "They will suggest a bunch of unnecessary stuff to drive the bill up." Oh, walk around; sorry, it's my first one. Any solution that we put forward should be real and deliverable. That's what we're there for, after all, full stop. So that healthy growth will scale organically, strategically, and, most important, collaboratively.

Scene one: outcomes, not deliverables

[00:03:40] All right, we're going to set a few scenes and talk through them. I'm sure some of them might sound familiar. We're going to start at the end, because what we really need to do together to set the stage for that partnership is define outcomes and not just deliverables. You do not want just a pair of hired hands ticking off a list of activities that you need to chop down.

[00:04:03] Let's say the goal is: deliver a new checkout flow by Memorial Day. Sounds easy enough. But the problem is every decision, feature or pixel seems to come with extra dollar signs and an extended timeline. Stop me if you've heard this before. You might say, "Hey, we'll need to add push notifications." The agency might say, "Sure, no problem, but we need to add another design round and another designer." You're like, "Wait, what happened?" "Well, it's out of scope." Are you making a checkout flow or playing Simon Says? Every screen feels like a high-stakes negotiation. Costs are ballooning, and launch day, please. Not to mention trust is eroding by the minute. Have you ever been in a situation like this? Yeah, some head nods.

[00:05:04] Where did it go wrong? If we take it back to that transactional start: even when spelled out in black and white, the words in a contract can leave a ton of room for misinterpretation. It sounds like this one was built for a vendor relationship and not a partnership. The agency was given marching orders to do a thing, but no real insight into why that matters and what impact it'll have on your users. The focus was on outputs and things to do, not outcomes or business success.

[00:05:38] How do we fix that? You need to look for a partner, not just an executor. If we rewind the clock and set this up for mutual success, the agency is aligned to your business goals. Think about key behaviors, flows or activities that your user might do on your site, your website, whatever the experience is (it could be a kiosk), that will drive product success. I'll be pulling from different experiences in my past. If you work for an e-commerce site, you might have determined that new users who place five orders in 90 days (it could be anything, sweaters, asparagus; I say that because I've worked at both online clothing retail and a grocery deliverer) have a lifetime value 20% higher on average. This is all speculative and made up, but it's just to paint a picture that there should be some kind of thread you can pull through, from the activities to the value.

[00:06:42] This contract for success needs room for iteration. No one nails it right out of the gate. User discovery and insights will continue to evolve over time, and you need room to adjust as you learn more. That lifetime value gain is well worth building a few nudges and prompts into your user journey if they've gone idle. Pivots happen deliberately, not through guesses or assumptions. In the face of compelling data, insights or critical user gaps, we adjust to that new information, but with intention and confidence, accounting of course for any necessary trade-offs made to accommodate them. So that lifetime gain is totally worth it. Glitter confetti shooting out of a cannon when they stick it in their cart might not be, but we'll discuss.

[00:07:30] Costs are predictable, and not a constant surprise party. Weekly rates and monthly maximums are just a few of many ways to stop the nickel and diming. Not to mention that value and currency don't always have to translate to cash. What co-marketing activities might you be able to do that could lend value to both sides of the aisle? Case studies, podcasts, logo usage, et cetera. Get really creative with that.

Scene two: ready, fire, aim

[00:08:00] Scene two is ready, fire, aim. So often we take off down the road, recalibrate, have to change course and start over again. To set this scene: we're still with the same agency and in-house experience. Things seem better, until they aren't. The agency is now embedded; we're working as a partner. But suddenly there's internal drag and friction. What can we do to get ahead of that? Maybe your copywriting team is slammed and has no capacity to put towards your effort. The engineering team is forcing tech stack changes mid-project. And maybe you did secure budget for that extra designer, but the very necessary system access they need is stuck in a procurement swirl. "She died of procurement" will be on my tombstone. So now the agency's hands are tied. They're blocked by bureaucratic bottlenecks. Work slows down, velocity all but grinds to a halt, and once again you are not getting value, and the frustration is building.

[00:09:05] Where did it go wrong? No one planned for execution realities. When I was in-house, this happened all the time. My special marketing project meant nothing much, let's just say, to the technology team, to the design team, et cetera. The most solid, airtight plan can still fall apart if no one maps out how it will actually come to life. The team green-lit a plan without resourcing the work. The strategy was sound, but the people responsible for doing it didn't always have the capacity or context to execute effectively.

[00:09:43] Key dependencies weren't surfaced until too late. That quick fix turned out to rely on a ton of back-end work, complex analytics tagging, and a reworked customer journey, touching departments who weren't involved in the original scoping. Everyone assumed alignment, but no one verified it. Kickoff was enthusiastic; it always is, it feels great. But the day-to-day flow hit snags with assumptions and competing priorities; it was not coordinated. There was no shared definition of done. One team's definition of completion, or even good enough, didn't match another's. QA, it's never good enough, sent it back with bugs. The product manager said, "Ship it," while designers were still tweaking.

[00:10:30] If we rewind and set that up for success, we need to really take the time to map the total ecosystem you find yourself in. What might you discover and get ahead of if you truly take the time to take a 30,000-foot view of your organization? Map out the affected groups and the players needed to pull off your plan. In doing so, you can even add the agency partners themselves as a touch point in that journey, and even customers if it's relevant.

[00:11:00] Define those blockers and dependencies. Cross-departmental partners with competing roadmaps of their own may have little to no time for your project's needs. It's not that they don't want to or don't care; they've got their own competing priorities that they're up against as well. And while the words blockers and dependencies seem to carry somewhat negative connotations, really taking the time to map them out can surface where the opportunities and solutions lie.

[00:11:25] You then want to sequence that work, once you've identified the players and actions, and create an ambitious but informed timeline of coordinated handoffs, with built-in feedback loops. Rather than feeling ambushed and pressured, they now have an opportunity to work your ask into their schedules. And finally: socialize, socialize, socialize. Pull your group together and talk through the plan live. It's important that people have a chance to air the anxieties or trepidations this might surface, and this will allow you to get on the same page, with a shared sense of urgency towards the mission. Co-conspirators are much more fun to work with than adversaries. If they feel like they're in on it with you, they can come along for the ride and not be dragged along.

Scene three: who's the boss

[00:12:12] And finally: who's the boss? Here we're going to define boundaries, not just buy-in, with the grand assumption that you're now humming along as a unit. The agency is cruising, the teams are delivering, launch is in your sights. But what happens next? The fancy industry term we like to use is the old swoop and poop. You might have leadership that shows up; maybe it's a new exec, maybe it's someone who just hadn't heard about the project yet. Midway through, they come through with a new priority, or simply a new opinion, and suddenly you're back at square one.

[00:12:51] It might look a little something like this. "We're finalizing the last user flows this week." "Wait, why are we even using this platform?" Insert brand, whatever the case might be. "Because we aligned on it two months ago." "Yeah, we should pivot entirely." And you cry. "Let's get a new deck together by Friday." "Sure." The team is now forced to change direction, the agency feels sidelined, and you are in the tank for months of work that you have nothing to show for.

[00:13:23] Where did this one go wrong? Let's define the problem here. There was no alignment at the top. It wasn't the agency's fault, and it wasn't the product team's fault. We now have a common, uniting enemy in our senior leadership, so that's always fun too. It was a slow, silent unraveling of a project that never had a unified voice at the highest level. Leadership was looped in a little too late, and by the time execs were given a chance to weigh in, all the hard decisions had been made, and unraveling them meant losing weeks and weeks of work, maybe months. I've seen worse.

[00:14:00] No one owned the big picture. Each function focused on their part of the puzzle, and no one was actively steering toward the original vision or protecting it from disruption. And there was no shared north star. Teams aligned on different interpretations of success. One exec prioritized brand polish; another wanted to focus on adding AI. You may have heard of it. Without agreement, every review felt like a reset. Course corrections came without a safety net. Pivots are inevitable, but without clear escalation paths, every change felt reactive, not strategic: the board, investor pressures, et cetera. No one knew who had the final say, or how to move forward without further stalling.

[00:14:51] How do we fix that? It's tough, but we can try to unpack some tips for you. We're winding this back and setting it up for the mutual success we're looking for. Leadership is involved at the start, not just at the end. Anyone who holds veto power needs to be present during the kickoff. Otherwise, you're not launching a project; you are setting up your C-suite to be blindsided, and they don't like that. Set expectations early about who needs that visibility and when.

[00:15:21] There needs to be a clear escalation path: if or when things go sideways, who gets to call it? Having an agreed-upon decision maker, or even a small committee, a small one, ensures pivots are thoughtful and not panic-fueled. No more leadership whiplash. Define the vision once and protect it. Your core objective shouldn't be up for debate every sprint. Document it, share it, align on it. That way, when shiny new ideas pop up, teams can point to it and ask, "Does this move us closer to our goal?" And finally, give the agency some air cover. Empowered partners make better decisions. Make sure your agency knows you've got their back, and that they're not stuck defending the plan solo when someone new parachutes in with a quick question.

Scene four: a successful partnership

[00:16:18] Scene four: a successful partnership, where it all comes together. We have trust, clarity and momentum, and now the agency isn't just hitting their deadlines; they're helping you drive your business forward. Decisions are made efficiently, with clear owners. Adjustments happen without bureaucracy. Costs are predictable, transparent, and tied to business value. And the company and customers feel real impact.

[00:16:49] The key takeaways for how to build a true partnership: define your outcomes, not just tasks and deliverables; they have to be tied to a goal, not just activity. Plan for execution realities: surface blockers and dependencies early by checking in with your internal teammates. Clarify decision-making power: who are the day-to-day approvers with the authority to call it? Secure that very important leadership buy-in, and avoid last-minute interference from higher-ups. Plan for some buffer; no industry is immune to strategy shifts or market pressures outside any of our control. Tariffs. And think long term: invest in relationships, not just contracts.

[00:17:40] Finally, a little vulnerability goes a long way. Don't be afraid to tell them things. Let them in; let them get some buy-in to your cause and your pains. When people are made aware of your pains, fears and anxieties, they can take your problems on as their own and craft better solutions with you. So, would you rather have a vendor who follows orders, or a partner who helps you succeed? Thank you.

Q&A

[00:18:19] Host: Yes, wonderful job there. We've got time on the clock, so that means you're stuck with me for a little bit. We can do this together. You feeling it? I don't know. No, no, we have to stop; I have no rhythm. Let's go ahead and dive into the Q&A. Before we even get to these, I just want to compliment you: the relationship between agencies and vendors, the nature of partnership, is something I'm really happy to hear about, and I'm sure many in the audience agree. What led you to put the presentation together? What was the inspiration to come up here on stage and share your perspective?

[00:19:08] Tanesha: Going from in-house to agency, there was always this subtle or implied eye roll, like, "Oh, consultants." And it was like, I'm not a lawyer, for God's sake. Just kidding. But it had this connotation, and dare I say reputation, that I wanted to stand up against. I think there are ethical agencies; I think there are stand-up, do-right agencies. There are bad ones, and it largely depends on who you're dealing with, so selection really matters as well. But I wanted to model what a healthy consultant relationship could look like.

[00:19:46] Host: There was definitely some gold in those slides, for sure. As for the nature of the questions we have here, there should be very few surprises for you given the content. The first question deals with the billing model. What do you think works best in terms of retained services, time and materials, project-based? We'd love to hear your perspective on what works best for what contexts.

[00:20:17] Tanesha: The length and complexity can play a big part in how you might arrive at your final answer. But if controlling cost is your driving motivation, and I get it, it is for lots of people, fixed-fee models sometimes provide some sanity and safety, so at least you know there's not going to be a surprise when you open that invoice. There could be monthly maxes or weekly rates, and that normalizes what the pace of that billing starts to look like. You could do a weekly rate but still get a monthly invoice, just to be clear. Versus maybe a T&M model, as you mentioned: if you have a better idea of exactly what you're doing and you just want hired hands, maybe the T&M model makes sense, because you just want to run it at a rate where you can match the ebb and flow as you see fit. Versus something where you want to do a little more exploration, where the caps or maxes might add some security.

[00:21:18] Host: Absolutely. To your finance department. So it sounds like it depends on the type of outcomes somebody might want and/or the nature of the relationship that's best for the client.

[00:21:29] Tanesha: Yeah. If you're doing a more exploratory exercise, it might make sense to cap that at, say, six weeks for however many tens of thousands of dollars you might be talking about, for example. Maybe that's time-boxed and attached to a fixed amount of some sort. So there are other ways to explore that, hybrids.

[00:21:49] Host: Right. You teed up some really great scenarios that I definitely related to. There's a question that's masquerading as an additional scenario. Swoop and poop comes in: a stakeholder doesn't like what they've seen, even if they've been smiling and nodding the whole time. I'm sure that's never happened to anybody in this room. Not once. It feels like fan fiction in a way. But when something like that happens, do you have any advice, from a consulting position, on how to go back and renegotiate a goalpost, or maybe submit a CR at the end of something like that?

[00:22:38] Tanesha: Yes, there are a couple of ways to handle that. There could in fact be a change request. But one thing I like to do is capture every hope, dream and wish I've heard along the way on the project and put it on the roadmap. The roadmap is a balm, and gives people a lot of safety: "Oh, she is listening. She heard me. It's right there, next quarter. Oh, okay." Sometimes that is a really effective tool to let them know they've been heard, they've been considered, and they've been allocated for. We can then have a conversation about whether it lives here or here on the roadmap, but at least they know it exists, and that usually helps to allay a lot of anxieties. If in fact they want to insert it, then yes, that is a discussion that might necessitate a change.

[00:23:26] Host: Gotcha. Perhaps.

[00:23:29] Tanesha: Yeah. Or we trade it. I love to trade.

[00:23:32] Host: What do you mean?

[00:23:32] Tanesha: If you need that cannon to shoot glitter confetti when a customer puts shoes into their shopping cart, for instance (just an example, random example), then you might not be able to have something else that we had initially prioritized. So just moving the pieces around.

[00:23:53] Host: You had me at it. There's also another somewhat high-level scenario. As a consultant, there may be a case where, as an individual contributor or member of a consulting team, I'm deployed into a mix of consultants, or into a scenario where a client might have a bit of a skewed or negative bias towards me. I may be perceived as someone who's part of a previous regime, or an org that is not looked upon favorably. As an individual, how would you advise someone to navigate those waters?

[00:24:37] Tanesha: Just pull them closer. I like to give them a lot of attention. Maybe get a one-on-one booked with them, and try to figure out where that's coming from. Respect their expertise. I think the one major thing people worry about is that the consultant is going to take over, and I can't, not without your explicit participation. I'm not trying to take over. What we have to lend of value to the scenario is, again, the reps, the times we've done it. I can give you a safe play space, or guardrails to work within, but I cannot and do not want to usurp your SME expertise. I need it. So letting that person shine in the best way they know how, I think, allows them to feel respected and able to contribute with you.

[00:25:30] Host: So, come at it head-on. Set up the one-on-one, listen, and try to shower them with time and attention, and let them shine for the expertise that they hold.

[00:25:42] Tanesha: All right. I couldn't put that better.

[00:25:44] Host: Tanesha, thank you. It's been a real pleasure.

[00:25:47] Tanesha: Thank you. Okay, thank you so much.