Our approach
We're business-oriented designers
As a designer at Columbia Road, you get to work with a wide variety of different industries and different clients. Being a design consultant means that you have two skills sets you get to use every day: hands-on design work and consulting.
Versatile backgrounds
Designers at Columbia Road are a diverse bunch. Some of us have studied arts, others business or engineering. A handful of us have done it all. We love to help each other out when the client work takes us outside of our comfort zone.
Test and measure
One thing that unites us is the hunger for measurable business results. When we test for usability or understandability, we also look for signs of willingness to pay. When we set up UX analytics, we will also track conversions and see how metrics like average order value changes over time.
Solving business problems
We create business impact for our (usually large and well-known) clients, often visible to many consumers or companies. Seeing the impact of your work first-hand, building long partnerships, and measuring and improving services are the bread and butter for Roadies.
Prototyping and testing
In order to learn, we sometimes have to ship versions that don’t look or feel perfect, but will help us get closer to the truth.
We know that good design earlier pays for great design later. Instead of treating the design deliverable as an end itself, we see it as a way to reach the ultimate goal: satisfying user and business needs.
Cross-functional teamwork
We work seamlessly with our developer and martech colleagues. We involve client stakeholders and teammates in the ideation, problem discovery and testing.
All of our designers get better at what they do not only because they learn from their designer peers, but because they interact so much with the other competences.
Immediate and slower change
Immediately measurable changes in business & UX metrics feel great. However, sometimes the design consultant's major impact comes from the observation that there might be more to a customer pain or gain than is obvious on the surface.
We help our clients improve both incrementally and by creating something completely new.
Learning with clients
While we offer a multitude of opportunities for learning, client work is the ultimate chance to learn the most. That is simply because most of us spend almost all of our time with clients.
We try to build projects so that they line up with consultants’ wishes for learning and development. Sometimes it's new design skills, sometimes people skills. What you learn in a project is much defined by how open you are to new adventures and opportunities to take the mental role of an apprentice.
The Roadie community
There is no question, problem, or even a passing thought that would ever go unnoticed if you voice it out. You can rely on the support of a community that goes out of its way to care for each other.
You'll have 150+ experts in software development, design and marketing technology ready at your service. In addition, we have a very strong feedback culture that creates a safe environment to push each other forward.
Checkpoints and Mentoring
Checkpoints are our way of getting feedback and planning for professional development. They are not performance reviews and are 100% up to each Roadie to plan. You can choose the person to have the checkpoint with, you can choose the topic and you can choose the method.
A set of Roadies have been educated as Mentors, who have skills and tools to hold supportive, meaningful and inspirational checkpoints. The Mentors will guide you, but you get to choose what kind of discussion is best for you.
Organised learning
We organise monthly Lessons Learned sessions that are focused on stories and learnings that have made a difference at a client. The projects are sometimes straightforward, sometimes challenging. Quick wins or long term incremental improvement. At all times, they are unique learning opportunities.
The designers at Columbia Road also organise biweekly learning sessions on current and interesting topics. The biweeklies are for sharing solutions to problems you've discovered, for helping others, for hearing about new developments in your field and sometimes to welcome speakers from other organisations and learning from them.