Onboarding New Designers Shouldn't Be a Problem: Here's How to Onboard Your Remote Team

The dilemma of in-house designer vs agency is truly eternal. Years pass by, yet companies still wonder what is the better option for them – and by “better” they often mean the price-quality ratio. 

But the harsh truth is that there’s no one answer to this question. In the end, it all depends on your company’s budget, business needs, and the ultimate goal that you want to achieve by hiring new designers. So how do you make that choice, after all?

To help you with that, Eleken prepared some of the real-world scenarios that usually lead to design agency vs in-house choice. And for each scenario we suggested what would be the best option, so keep reading to learn more!

Scenario 1: you’re a fast-growing startup that requires a rapidly expanding UI/UX team to support your product development

While rapid growth might sound like good news for many startups, it also means that now you have to expand your in-house design team to keep working at the same pace.

New in-house employees will be able to become a part of the company’s culture and vision, and the communication will be as seamless as possible. If you know that the growth will continue, expanding your team with in-house workers is a great choice. 

At the same time, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding new people takes time, so you might not get the desired development speed. This also means that your company will need to allocate some extra resources on hiring and training new staff, which would affect your budget, too.

So, what is the alternative? Turning to an agency like Eleken for a team extension!  Eleken has a diverse pool of design talents and is able to quickly match you with a designer familiar with your industry. You can hire a designer (or designers) for 2 months and then decide if you want to continue working with a team of such size. It’s much less risky!

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Scenario 2: your company wants to enhance the user experience and modernize the existing products by redesigning UI/UX

Even successful solutions eventually require redesign, mostly for two reasons:

1. The product is great, but doesn’t meet the current user needs.
2. The product has some UI/UX issues that need to be fixed.

In-house designers are well familiar with the product as they’ve been working on it for a while already. Furthermore, being a part of your staff they can seamlessly collaborate with the development team, discussing what can potentially be added and what could be technically difficult. 

On the other hand, no one said the design agency team can’t do the same. At Eleken, for example, our designers don’t work on their own. When our designer  joins your team, they instantly start communicating with your team, learning from their experience and gaining new insights. What’s more, our designers have the support of design managers – senior-level professionals, who guide them during their work process. This allows us to offer a broader range of design concepts and creative ideas to our clients.

This scenario happened with HealthStream, who came to Eleken to redesign their reporting tool. It hasn’t been renewed for about 15 years, and, naturally, didn’t meet the needs of modern users. 

While they tried to solve this problem with a new product, it still didn’t work. That’s why they turned to Eleken for help. Our designers worked together with their in-house staff to improve the product’s look and feel: the client’s manager ran the testing and helped us align the designs with the client’s vision. In the end, a good redesign based on the thorough user research did its job, leaving the client satisfied.

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Scenario 3: your company needs specialized design expertise for a specific project or industry

We believe that a good designer can figure out the essence of your product, even if they weren’t familiar with the market before. Still, if a designer already has experience with a project similar to yours, that’s even better, especially if we are talking about very niche things, for example, solutions that work with geospatial data. 

If your project or industry is a rare bird, building an in-house team of designers is indeed a good idea. Even if they don’t have domain-specific knowledge yet, you’ll be able to nurture them as time goes. Still, their onboarding and training takes a lot of time, so you should opt for this strategy only when you believe that it’s worth the time and effort.

On the other hand, design agencies like Eleken have the right talent with experience in specific industries. Some of our clients (Astraea, for instance), were pleasantly surprised to discover that we work with their rare niche: geospatial data.

Our designers helped redesign Astraea, simplifying its interface, and implementing new features (such as Monitoring). Here’s what Astraea’s VP Product, Jamie Conklin, says about our collaboration in the Clutch review:

It is unusual to find a designer who has experience building applications with geospatial data - especially imagery data. We found that in Eleken. The value proposition is very high with Eleken — their rates are fair and their team is excellent.

So even if you need help with something very unique, we can support you.

Scenario 4: your company must balance design quality and cost-effectiveness within the budget constraints

Unless you are Leo DiCaprio’s character from “The Wolf of Wall Street”, you probably cannot afford to spend money like that:

This means that you need to think hard about how many in-house designers you need on your team and for how long. You also need to remember that the total cost of hiring an employee doesn’t equal their earnings. In fact, in the US it’s typically 1.25 to 1.4 times the salary. Looking for the right professional, negotiating with them, guiding them through the onboarding process adds to the total cost. 

What’s more, they also require time — and as we know, time is money. Depending on the position and experience level, it might take 2 months or more before a newly hired employee actually starts working on your project.

Does it mean that you should avoid hiring in-house designers at any cost? No. But you have to think ahead when planning to expand your team. If you need some extra design support now, but might not need it a few months later, hiring a design agency would be a smarter decision.

Working with Eleken can help you save costs in the following ways: 

• You get a free trial. Our designer will work for you for 3 days at no cost, so you can see if they are a match for your project. 
• When you decide to collaborate, you pay a fixed monthly rate. Eleken offers a subscription-based pricing model. You pay a fixed amount each month and get a full-time UI/UX designer working on your product. As we are a SaaS-oriented design agency, we ourselves work using the SaaS model.
• You can easily scale your team up and down when necessary. If at some point you need a bigger team to cover all your design needs, just let us know and we’ll expand the number of designers.

Last but not least, collaboration with Eleken allows you to get high-quality services for less money than the US agencies usually charge. Just take a look at what our clients are saying!

Scenario 5: your company has a critical project with a tight deadline that requires immediate attention

No matter how good your company might be in terms of project management, deadlines can still happen, and naturally, have to be resolved at any cost. But if your existing team is already swamped with tasks, it might be difficult for them to take on extra work. 

In this case you might need not only to expand your team, but do it as quickly as possible. So traditional in-house hiring (that could sometimes last for months) is not your best bet here. 

With Eleken, you can get a skilled designer much quicker. We not only hire the best ones with extensive experience, great portfolios, and strong social skills, but also train them internally before they start working with clients. And if certain tasks turn out to be quite difficult, our specialists can consult with colleagues, get their works reviewed by peers, and brainstorm new ideas to help you deliver the project within even the tightest deadlines.

Hiring Eleken designers for your project. Pros and cons

Eleken isn’t your ordinary design agency — we are a pragmatic design agency that works only with SaaS businesses. When you turn to us for design support, you get a thorough understanding of your product, industry, and your audience combined with clear communication, affordable prices and zero micromanagement.

Obviously, we won’t be a perfect fit for everyone, so to make a better decision, here’s a list of our advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages

• No overheads. You save the resources as you don’t have to pay sick leaves, vacation leaves, taxes for each employee. We care about it for you.
• No difficulties with the hiring process. We hire UI/UX designers with the expertise that match your project requirements. Each designer is trained to get familiar with our workflow and has the support of design managers during each project. So, no worries about finding and teaching personnel on your own.
• Speak directly with the designer without any intermediaries. We believe that there is no need for managers as you are the one who makes decisions and the designer is the one who performs the scope of work. No misunderstandings or “Chinese whispers”, you will be able to communicate directly with your designer.
• A whole design team’s experience to help you. If a challenging task arises, our specialists can consult with colleagues, get their works reviewed by peers, and brainstorm new ideas. Thanks to that, they can handle any emerging challenges quicker. 
• Free trial. To make an informed decision whether you want to cooperate with us, we provide a three-days free trial.
• Change the number of designers when needed. When you need a bigger team to cover all your design needs, just let us know and we’ll expand the number of designers.

Disadvantages

• Not suitable for short-term projects. We can’t design just a landing page or some icons.
• SaaS companies only. We work solely with SaaS projects.
• Don’t work without any communication. If you don’t have time for daily communication and exchanging feedback and want everything done solely by our team, we are not a fit.

But if you find yourself in any of the situations listed below, we can help you:

• You are a SaaS company with or without a product on the market.
• You are looking for a design partner to create the best design solution together based on research, communication, and discussions.
• You want to work with professionals that have a deep understanding of your business needs.
• You are looking for a long-term commitment.

Of course, all of the above are just words. To prove that we deliver our promises, take a look at our case studies.

In-house vs agency. What will work better in your case?

In the long run, your decision about hiring a web design agency vs in-house employees will likely depend on your time and budget, so it is extremely important to keep the pros and cons of both options in mind. Focus on your long-term goals and let them determine the direction in which you are heading.

Summing up, let us note that there is no universal answer to the “in-house vs agency" debate. But when you ‘re looking for a designer for your app, and believe that a design agency is worth considering, Eleken is at your service.

If you want to know more about the way we work – drop us a line and we will schedule a call to answer all your questions. 

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The product owner (PO) plays a central role in the product development process. They establish the vision, keep track of the product backlog, foresee user demands, and are responsible for the success of both the team and the product.

On the other side, product designers are aware of the vision (which POs share with them), represent the interests of the users, and are responsible for the product experience. They must collaborate closely with the product owner in order to succeed in their position.

So, it comes as no surprise that such close cooperation may cause certain challenges of a product owner that works with a designer. And these challenges may seem even more dramatic when it comes to working with an external design team.

Being a team of remote product designers that regularly communicate with POs ourselves, we at Eleken believe we have enough experience to say that most issues are often exaggerated and can be eliminated with the right approach.

In this article, we will list the six biggest challenges of a product owner when working with external designers and give you a clue on how to cope with them.

Challenge 1: Getting new designers up to speed

The first product owner vs UX designer challenge usually comes when you have to introduce new employees to the project. Helping new members feel completely prepared to take on their jobs requires ongoing cooperation and a lot of effort, while onboarding a remote design team takes extra attention.

It is essential to make sure that each employee is aware of the product's mission, company’s values, and culture from the outset. In the end, how you integrate new team members will determine how quickly they catch up.

How we deal with it at Eleken

The effective design onboarding stands on two whales: communication, and information. In other words, to get new external designers up to speed successfully, be prepared to answer a lot of questions and give your designers access to as much information as possible.

• One-on-one conversation. It’s best to start the onboarding process with a one-on-one conversation. The clearer you can communicate your needs and product vision, the quicker external designers will be able to deliver a suitable final result.
• Communication with other team members. To better understand the essence of the product, and therefore to be able to create effective designs, it’s vital for the designer to get acquainted with each team member involved in the product development process.
• Share access to additional materials that will be useful for your designer from the first days of work (for example, access to profiles and team workspaces on different apps, content, images, copy texts, data on user feedback, and the like).

Challenge 2: Lack of trust (from the PO’s side) and lack of responsiveness (from the designers’ side)

We’ve decided to put these two issues under one title as we believe they have the same root and very similar solutions.

It often becomes challenging for a PO to communicate and clarify their thoughts with external teams via virtual interaction. As a result, product owners can experience a lack of trust, poor team communication, misalignment, low engagement, and poor progress.

How we deal with it at Eleken

Our head of design, Maksym, says that “prominent design teams are built on trust and autonomy”. Therefore, he empowers Eleken team members to the point where they are capable of making critical design decisions on their own, without his supervision.

However, as for a PO that hires an external team, there’s no time to educate designers from scratch. How to gain trust and ensure new employees will be fully dedicated to the project? 

We believe that product owners have to consider the matter of trust at the stage of hiring.

• Carefully examine the portfolio to understand if you like the designers’ style and if they have experience working in your industry.
• Prepare a list of questions beforehand and conduct a video interview to understand if you feel comfortable communicating with designers, like their manner of speaking, and in general feel the connection.
• Ask to complete a small test task (design one screen, for example) to make sure you like the design approach of the design team and the outcome. At Eleken, we have a three-day free trial for this purpose to help our clients decide if we’re a perfect match.

Challenge 3: Developers and designers don't understand each other

As the one responsible for the team’s productivity and the quality of the outcome, the product owner is highly interested in effective and smooth designer-developer collaboration.

However, there’s a common misconception that developers and designers are from two different planets - tech and creative - which makes the communication between the two tough and disorganized. 

That’s why product owners may worry that designers will overlook developers’ requirements, engineers will misunderstand the design idea they are about to implement, the whole project will go wrong and the deadlines will be missed. 

How we deal with it at Eleken

• Engineers won’t be able to technically implement a design. 

In fact, both specialists use analytical thinking and creative problem-solving in their work and are able to communicate well together. So the issue described above may become a reality when designers and developers are placed in two different teams isolated from each other.

Our team always asks developers whether they can code this or that part of the interface once they find their idea might be too sophisticated to implement. Thus, our first tip is to let your designers and developers contact each other freely.

• Designers will create an overcomplicated design or, vice versa, miss some details.

To avoid such situations, we approve each design with the client’s side. And as one of the product owner's responsibilities is to share the product vision with the team, they often act as a middleman between us and the engineers.

So, you can easily overcome this challenge if you dedicate enough time to communicating with your designers and developers.

• Developers will get the design idea wrong. 

Final mockups can confuse the viewer as they often look pretty similar. Though, to ensure the development team is able to implement each screen correctly our UI/UX designers create separate pages in Figma for different user flows, label each screen, and add notes with descriptions to ensure the design idea is clear.

Challenge 4: Misaligned expectations

Delivery that doesn't match your expectations is another PO’s challenge, or we can even say PO’s nightmare.

Unlike in-house employees that know their company’s values and understand the product perfectly well, when hiring external designers you can’t be 100 percent sure about the quality of the outcome. 

So, what if the promises of the external designers are high, but the final result is radically different?

How we deal with it at Eleken

Well, actually, we believe such a problem may only occur if you leave the designer alone for the entire product design process, come at the end to review the job done, and realize everything works completely wrong.

And again, the key to resolving this issue is communication, an integral part of the product owner’s role. At Eleken, we have an iterative design process, where the successful outcome is determined by close cooperation and constant communication. We ask POs to approve our design concepts and design process steps so that they are always aware of the project’s progress. 

If you regularly communicate with designers, review their work, and provide timely feedback, you would be able to point out anything we missed, so that we could provide a better solution. And luckily, there are plenty of tools for effective remote collaboration to make your life easier.

Challenge 5: Time zone mismatch

The modern world shows that a 9-to-5 workday isn’t relevant for most of us anymore and Agile teams can be dispersed throughout the country (or even the globe). This new reality causes product owners to be frequently left working separately from their teams. Additionally, even though most businesses have done a good job of adapting to the remote work environment, POs may still face difficulties due to not being able to get in contact with their team members at any time they need.

Don’t worry, after years of working remotely with clients from San Francisco, London, Montreal, Amsterdam, Singapore, New York, and more Eleken team learned that it’s possible for companies of a different scale to be successful even when their employees are working at different continents. 

How we deal with it at Eleken

First of all, wherever your designers are located, there’s always a time overlap that allows to run a productive team meeting. For instance, our work hours extend from 8 am to 8 pm EEST and we adjust our schedules to our client's time zone to be able to communicate regularly even if our client works from Australia.

Here’re several more practical tips to cope with the time zone difference:

1. Convert time zones. A world clock on your laptop is the greatest method to stay aware of time zones. If you're using Slack for business communication, you may click on a user's name to view their location and determine the optimal time to get in touch with them.

Additionally, to be aware of the time difference between you and your coworkers, you may use timezone meeting planners or online tools like WorldTimeBuddy, EveryTimeZone, World Clock Meeting Planner.

2. Set tasks as if it was a relay race rather than a rowing team. In a rowing team, everyone has to be in the same boat at the same time. And in such a case you need everyone’s presence at each meeting. Organizing work processes as a relay race you just need individuals to have some overlap to hand over the work from one team member to the other.
3. Let your team know when it’s better to contact you. Even while you might feel the need to be accessible to your designers 24/7, doing so is unsustainable and may even be an indication that you are micromanaging them. Establish clear rules for your employees on when they may and may not call you.
4. Hire those who are ready to take responsibility for their duties. When hiring a new employee, look for people that are not afraid of having a lot of autonomy. Our design lead Maksym always says he trusts each of our designers, that’s why he doesn’t have any troubles managing a remote team.

Challenge 6: Cultural differences

Hiring an external design team means that your new employees may work from any part of the world and have their own communication styles and personal frames of reference. For instance, workers from various nations differently share their ideas: some team members freely speak up all their thoughts and opinions without filtering them, while people from hierarchical cultures prefer to take their time to think before saying a word.

Is it possible to work with people with different work ethics, languages, customs, and cultures in a way that doesn’t create friction or tension?

How we deal with it at Eleken

Similarly to the lack of trust issue (see “Challenge 3”), to avoid a problem of misunderstanding based on cultural differences, you have to carefully analyze the designers you are about to work with: study their portfolio, have an audio call before signing the contract, give a small test task to ensure you both understand each other.

What about the challenges designers face when working with product owners?

At this point, we’ve discussed how product owners should be managing a design team to get the most out of this collaboration and eliminate difficulties. But the term “collaboration” means that there are two sides equally responsible for the successful outcome.

Consequently, some issues that negatively affect the coexistence of a product owner and a design team can be easily excluded when the PO is aware of them.

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1. No clear product vision.

When the product owner doesn’t understand their product’s purpose, or can’t give clear directions about further designers’ tasks, they should be ready to wait until the designer finds answers to all the questions by themselves. It would take additional time to conduct user research, and competitor analysis, develop concepts, present them to you, and iterate on a suitable solution. Overall, it’s not always a problem if you don’t mind waiting and don’t have strict deadlines.

To avoid such situations, find time to understand what you want to create and why before hiring UI/UX designers.

2. Insufficient involvement in the process.

Unfortunately, designers can’t read minds. If the PO doesn’t invest enough time and effort in communication then they risk blocking their designers’ work processes.

Communicate with the designer regularly, be ready to answer any questions, and provide feedback as fast as possible.

3. No access to all team members.

Each employee that is somehow connected to the product has something useful to tell the UI/UX designer. If, for example, the designer can't reach out to developers they can’t be sure whether the mockups they create are possible to implement technically. Without the ability to talk to a customer support representative, designers can omit some essential users’ pain points that will later affect the overall user experience.

As a PO, you should give the external designer a possibility to talk with the representatives of all the departments that work on the project.

To sum up, after all the years of working as remote product designers, we can say that it’s not the place that determines your success, but the people you work with. You can be as successful working with external designers as with in-house employees if you manage to find a team you can trust.

Need a reliable SaaS design partner? Extend your team with Eleken.