The Challenge
On returning to Umi Digital in 2018, I identified that Sales, Design, Development, and Marketing operated as disconnected silos across the client project lifecycle: sales oversold on tender responses without design or dev input, design over-compensated for scope gaps discovered too late, development uncovered technical constraints only after commitments were made, forcing over-budget delivery, and marketing rarely executed the strategy the design was based on. Every project effectively started from zero, and delivered sites met no one’s original expectations by launch.
The Outcome
Gave every department visibility and input into scope before commitments were made, directly addressing the root causes of over-promising at sale, technical infeasibility discovered post-sale, and expectation mismatches at launch. The reusable base framework became the foundation for company-wide project pricing and an evolving design system reused across clients.
The Approach
Advocated for adopting HubSpot’s Growth-Driven Design methodology, an established, branded synthesis of Lean, Agile, and Design Thinking principles rather than something invented in-house, driven by a genuine business need: the agency needed a proper CRM platform, and pursuing GDD/HubSpot partner status created a route to trusted-advisor status with clients already using or considering HubSpot.
Owned the adoption end-to-end rather than treating it as a badge to acquire: restructured the sales process against industry norms, so that rather than promising full scope on a first-meeting estimate, real upfront discovery work produced a clickable prototype, letting clients see exactly what would be built before final scope and pricing were agreed.
Built a reusable internal framework, a shared boilerplate of layouts and features kept in sync across design and development toolchains, enabling faster, more accurate estimating, and evolving over time into a proper multi-client design system. Used page-builder tools for rapid, editable prototyping to secure client buy-in quickly, while final builds remained on the agency’s own codebase. Introduced fast site-mapping tools to surface scope questions before and during sales meetings rather than after signing.
Managed resistance on both sides, developers sceptical of page-builder tooling, and clients fearing an MVP would look unfinished rather than polished but phased. Since the methodology’s own educational material was generic marketing-agency content with no hospitality relevance, closing that gap required building bespoke, industry-specific frameworks and training, which directly led to a separate Direct Booking Strategy framework.
