Automate it.
The steps that follow the same pattern every time.
Rebuilding the weekly report, copying details from one system to another, producing the same component in every size.
For you, and the team you’re bringing through change
We give your team its time back, then we help them use it well.
If you’ve been asked to find efficiency and you want to keep your best people while you do it, this page is for you.
We help you find where the hours go, build the systems that give them back, and lead the change alongside your team.
The real job is the change
You can buy the tools in an afternoon. Bringing your people with you is the work.
Every change meets the same moment, usually in the first fortnight, when your people start wondering what it means for them.
Handle that moment well and your team leans in. Handle it badly and your best people quietly start updating their CVs.
So we build the change with your people from the first day. They help map the work. They help decide what gets automated. They see it working on their own projects early, and they’re trained inside the work until they can run it without us. By the end, the system is something your team made, and that’s why it lasts.
The three groups
Every step of your team’s work goes into one of three groups.
We decide what ought to be automated before we decide what can be.
Assist it.
A person makes the call and the system does the heavy lifting.
Turning 300 survey replies into themes for a researcher to challenge, or drafting the documentation for a designer to check.
Keep it human.
The work that needs judgement, empathy and taste.
Sitting with a customer, choosing a direction, telling a stakeholder something they’d rather not hear.
What we build into your team
The system lives in your tools and runs on your work.
We’ve done this end to end in the past year, for four startups and on our own products: research synthesis, UX, design systems and full product builds, with the connections between systems that let them behave as one.
For you, that could mean research synthesis, a design system and component library, a prototyping environment, documentation and handoff, reporting, or the connections between the systems your people currently bridge by hand. Each part is built with your team, tested against your live systems and documented so it outlasts the engagement.
How it runs
Start with a day, build on live work and keep it improving.
The Untangling Day.
We bring between 4 and 10 of your people together for a day and map how the work really moves.
Every step gets its group, and you leave with the first project to build into and a clear sequence of next steps.
Find out moreThe Build.
We build the system into that project with your team alongside us.
We test it against your live systems and train your people inside the work until they run it themselves.
Fractional Experience Lead.
Ongoing senior involvement if you want the system to keep improving as your team grows.
Someone who knows the system and your team, keeping both moving.
Find out moreQuestions worth asking first
The things you’ll want to know before we start.
Where does our data go?
We agree the boundaries in the first conversation, before anything is set up, and work inside your security and privacy policies and your approved tools.
Who owns what’s built?
Your organisation does. The system, the components, the documentation and the workflows built for you belong to you.
What happens when you step away?
Your team keeps running it. Teaching your people is part of every engagement, so the system stays useful after we’ve gone.
Does this mean a smaller team?
Our aim is the same team doing more valuable work. Every engagement is designed around giving your people more time with customers and on new ideas.
What the time is for
Once the time is back, here’s what your team can do with it.
We’re building seasons for teams, each running 10 to 12 weeks on a real project your team already owns, with weekly working sessions and a launched outcome as the measure. They draw on the playbooks Charbel has written for Faster Zebra.
Register your interestInnovation
Your team takes a real problem from idea to a launched outcome with a repeatable nine-phase system, and learns to do it again without us.
Intrapreneurship
Your people build a new venture inside your organisation, from the first proposition to the route to market.
Creativity
Your team rebuilds its creative confidence and keeps the practice going long after the first session.
Storytelling
Your people learn to tell the story of a product, a brand or a change so the people who hear it care about it.
Why us
We’ve been teaching teams to do the work themselves for a long time.
Charbel founded Academy Xi, one of Australia’s first schools for practical UX and innovation skills, and trained thousands of people through it. At NSW Telco Authority we rebuilt a static product lifecycle document into a seven-phase working model, with the team rhythms to run it. And this year we rebuilt our own businesses on the same approach we’d bring to yours.
Bring us the work that’s eating your team’s week.
Tell us what your team does and where the hours go, and we’ll tell you how we’d start.
Start a conversation