Hot take: The Bifurcation of Design Services (McKinsey acquires Lunar)

[This is a ‘hot take’ hastily scribed while trying to get my household moving in the morning. Forgive typos and other lapses]

Management consulting firm McKinsey has just acquired Lunar Design, an industrial design firm that had been attempting to broaden its capabilities with product strategy and interaction design.

After my post on “San Francisco Design Agencies Feeling The Squeeze,” I was lumped in with the “design consulting firms are dead” bunch, because people are poor at reading comprehension. Design consulting isn’t dead, but it’s definitely morphing, and doing so in an interesting bifurcated way.

At one end you have the big management consulting firms either establishing or acquiring design practices (McKinsey had been growing one organically in-house before the Lunar acquisition, Accenture acquired Fjord, Deloitte has Deloitte Digital). These firms had seen companies like IDEO and Frog get big billings for projects of the sort that used to only go to them. They realized they needed a design competency to stay relevant in the 21st century. And now these firms are deploying design practices at the highest levels of global corporations as a tool for creating strategy. This is actually a really big deal for design as an industry and a practice, and one that hasn’t yet been at all sufficiently appreciated.

At the other end you have design firms who are positioning themselves as partners in the development and launch efforts. This is design for execution, often embedding with product teams, and focused on the detailed work of interaction, interface, and visual design and front-end development. This is typically a ‘gap-filling’ role — augmenting a client’s lack designers in-house.

And the middle? Historically, that was Adaptive Path’s sweet spot. There were multiple times we came in after someone like McKinsey had supplied a client with a Big Idea of where to go, and we would use our design practices to put shape to that existing strategy and suggest offerings and experiences they could deliver. Then we’d leave as the client would take our suggestions and implement them.

As companies have been staffing in-house design teams, that is where this middle work has moved. It hasn’t been worth hiring in-house designers to be the strategic dynamos a la McKinsey, and you can never hire enough designers for all the execution to be done. So, there seems to be plenty of work for design consultants in those regards. The middle bits? Not so much.