Together with A&G
Building a resilient brand is hard. It requires many teams to work together in a singular vision that often gets obscured by the block-and-tackling that comes with running a business. Northstar is our methodology for bringing senior leaders together to co-create the future of your brand across marketing, CX, and technology. The result is an aligned vision, quick wins, and a multi-year roadmap that has helped today's most notable brands leap ahead with customers at the center. It's what we do best.
In most cases, the solution already exist across our clients' business, it just takes the right mix of talent and process to bring everyone together so we can uncover the real problems and find common ground for new solutions.
From day one, our senior team brings outside knowledge to the table – sometimes it's industry-specific, other times there's a lot to learn outside the industry. Either way, diverse perspectives and inspiration take days to get to instead of weeks and months.
For the rest of the visioning phase, we'll feel like a start up. Learning everything we can as quickly as we can across a variety of sources – from talking to customers to embedding ourselves in the day-to-day lives of your employees.
Digital ecosystems can get more and more complicated over time and that can get in the way of simple user experiences. Digital Northstars help bring teams together to simplify technology architecture and build an integrated roadmap to that simplifies your digital strategy.
We believe a company's brand should extend beyond their marketing arm and deeper into the business – all the way into how people do their jobs. Our Northstar process can bring teams together to shape a holistic brand vision that gets everyone excited.
CX and Service Transformation is a daunting task that requires a lot of teams to work together. A unified vision of – not just what customers see – but what needs to happen through operations and technology can ensure every small action is a step towards realizing your vision.
Modern commerce brands need to think beyond price and convenience as differentiators. They need to dig deep into their brand, understand what they do better than Amazon, and create meaningful brand experiences that are useful, usable, and noteworthy.
We don't believe 100-page strategy decks filled with agency speak are all too helpful. Rather, we lean heavily on connecting strategy and vision with prototypes to tell a deeper story around the work we're doing. And prototypes aren't just for digital experiences either. We can prototype brand vision, new ways of working, and deeper technology integration. When done right, they're one of our most effective tools in helping invent, communicate, and plan the future of business.
From brand vision to digital products – we know how to create prototypes that bring ideas to life and tell stories around the future of business that get employees and executives excited about the future.
Nothing kills a great idea or program like stalled momentum. Often times called "the swirl", endless conference room conversations can be a drain on an organization, but prototypes help take ideas and create an artifact that stakeholders can react to, agree with (or disagree with), and feel tangible progress.
Prototypes gives us the ability to test out new ideas quickly with little investment. We often find ourselves designing the complex pieces first, proof-of-concepting out the risky integration points, and even placing our ideas in the hands of customers. The end result is a vision that has already uncovered and solved for the biggest risks (including consumer demand) ahead of continued investment.
What should come first…the design or the requirements? Well, both. And that’s what the Northstar prototyping process is designed to do. By bringing all teams into the room and rapidly iterating on ideas before requirements are defined, we can ensure that customer, business, and tech needs are equally addressed up front.
Almost anyone can think of a good idea – that’s not the hard part. The hard part is ensuring these ideas make their way into the world the way they were intended. Executional excellence matters and this final phase of the Northstar process is also one of the most critical. With our Northstar vision in hand, we follow a rigorous process to break down our vision into the right requirements and prioritize them based on business value and effort. The result is a clear view of what we need to do first and where we need to lay the groundwork for long-term transformation.
We've used our Northstar approach to solve big problems for today's most notable brands – including Keurig, Biogen, Fidelity, Toast, and more. It gives us the approach and framework we need to help our clients have an aligned vision across teams, a customer-validated prototype, quick wins to get started, and a transformational roadmap to bring your vision to life.
Contact us to learn more