“Producer” doesn’t equal Project Manager & Information Architect anymore.
I’ve been chatting to a few people at agencies around Sydney and there seems to be a theme emerging where Online Producers are no longer expected to be Project Managers as well as User Experience/ Information Architecture folk. I think this is awesome and reflects the fact that roles within our industry are evolving nicely and some things that we thought used to work well enough together are having to change as specialisms within a web team develop.
So a producer may have been typically responsible for consulting, dreaming up ideas, planning, information architecture, project management, account management, content creation, team management and more! There are a lot of tasks there and some compete for head space with each other in a big way e.g. Day to Day Project Management Vs Dreaming up ideas.
Going forward I think the roles are going to be more like: thinkers, planners, executers and completer finishers all working in collaboration on awesome web projects. The actual title might change, the number of people performing each component may vary and there will be overlaps still, but the days of a Producer trying to do everything that Visual Designers and Programmers don’t do are numbered.
This conforms nicely with my experience over the last 12 months.
I’ve seen a big need lately for IA-types to do conceptual design, think big, and be at the front of the project helping it along in terms of its design and the way it looks, feels and smells. But I am pleased to say that I’ve had a PM to worry about the management of things. It’s left me more head space to dream! … and I like it like that!
M
How about we just get rid of producers? I’ve seen a few very efficient agencies have clearly defined roles at a minimum (excluding sales/bus. dev) for Account Director, Creative Director, Project Manager, Solutions Architect, Interface Designer and Software Developer. Most producers in this model fall into either an AD or PM role.
AD, CD and SA do pre-sales
CD, PM and SA do scoping
PM, ID and SD do execution
It has always surprised me that agencies have producers, while traditional software development companies do not.
@Matthew - awesome, keep enjoying it, like you say, it’s nice to leave the worrying to the PMs who are good at PM while you dream up cool stuff for your clients.
@Andrew - re “get rid of producers” I assume you mean the term not the people!
I’d be happy to see the term fade out as it’s always been a bit ambiguous. A lot of web agencies evolved out of multimedia companies, think CD ROMs, Video and info-kiosks etc, where the term Producer is more established. Software companies will use PM’s and Interface Designers and Account Directors to achieve a similar goal. Because web agencies tend to be somewhere in the middle of the two I guess all of the titles get a little muddled up.
I’m going to sketch a graphic (and blog about it!) that shows the roles in a web team and where their involvement in a web project lies. stay tuned!
Hey Phil, great blog mate. Hope life’s good back in Sydney.
You make a good point here and it’s certainly the direction we’ve been heading over at NM. I think a big part of it is that UX design is (mostly) a creative discipline, whilst PM is predominantly planning and organising. I believe it’s rare to find people who are equally competent, and enjoy, both so they’ll naturally gravitate in one direction or another.
I started out as an interface designer, worked up to Art Director, started again as an account manager, became a producer and am now an ‘experience designer’. I do the same stuff now as I did as a producer - except for the project management. This means I get involved at the beginning of projects, follow them through til they get into build and then hand them over for the ‘execution’ stage. I’m still called on to clarify how things work but don’t get bogged down in the communication and delivery stuff that I used to. I also used to find that as soon as I had my project manager hat on I was more likely to compromise on features and/or experience just to get the thing out of the door - which was a horrible dual personality experience as I’d been responsible for specc-ing the thing in the first place…
Seems to me that my experience is reflected all around me with the producer role being split out into IA / UX / PM - just shows how much we used to do!
weird - mybloglog has got me mixed up with Willbo and is displaying his pic instead of mine?!
I think the theme you are noticing is a good one, and an important step towards having a good split of the required skill sets in the team.
I know since starting here at NM towers, I’ve been able to take a lot of the PM tasks off our producers and this has enabled them to spend more time on doing what they do, and love, best - IA. This also translates into more efficient budgeting - you know that the 40 hours IA you budget for really is going to spent on IA, and not on a combination of IA, PM and perhaps even QA.
Yes, there will always be a slight element of overlap in skills when you get down the grain, but if you can define the key differences between the two, and make sure everyone understands those differences, it should pay dividends.
/2p
PS - good to hear from you Phil