anthony galvin

A few weeks ago I left R/GA after nearly 4 years, working first as a Technical Team Lead and then as a Technical Director. I’ve learned 1000s of tiny lessons and quite a few big ones over the last few years. Here’s some key ones.

1. Multi-discipline collaboration from day 1
Complex (digital) projects require talented people from many disciplines. Casting the right team can be a challenge, but once on the ground (usually at R/GA in a war room), collaboration needs to be rapid, open and without (too much) ego.

2. Code scamps (aka prototypes) are essential
Just about working software is the best way of explaining an idea. If you can sketch in code, getting something up and running no matter how hacky then you’re moving forward. The things you learn by doing this early are nearly always invaluable as long as you’re prepared to throw away more than you keep - being over invested in the scamp is going to get in the way of iterating.

3. Really good QA helps produce really good products
The internet is everywhere and on everything (Brad Frost, also ex-rga has some great slides about this). I’ve worked on projects where the QA engineer is testing on 20 devices. Obviously there are real benefits in test automation, but there’s no shortcuts - at somepoint somebody is going to need to tap through your app on all the devices, again and again and again.

4. Work smart and work hard
The industry has a long hours culture and sometimes working hard (late) is the way to a briliant product. But it’s not the only way. From a technology point of view investing in smart work; automation, auto-scaling, developer tools that work is way better than just staying late.

5. Access to tools and permissions matter
The battle for better tools and services is constant. If you constantly put a barrier in front of getting things done then you kill the speed at which innovation can happen and in an agency environment slow projects die a slow death. If it takes a 48 hour helpdesk response to get the CI box back online or multiple paper based forms to spin up a cloud service then the velocity of your crack innovation team is being severly hampered.

6. Location doesn’t have to be important
There’s a clamour to have EVERYONE IN THE WAR ROOM ALL THE TIME. But collaboration doesn’t really work like that. Clearly facetime matters, and at the right stage of the project it really is worth having everyone sat in the same room. But having highly motivated, talented people pulling in the same direction is way more important than having them sat in the same office (or even timezone).