A year ago we published our fifty-project retrospective and talked about patterns, lessons, and what we'd do differently. Twelve months later, the answer to "what we'd do differently" is: not much. 2016 was a year of doing more of what works and doing it at a scale we hadn't attempted before.
The Year in Numbers
15+
client projects delivered in 2016, the most in a single year
The projects were bigger. Not just in budget, in complexity. Multi-phase enterprise builds with discovery workshops, user research, iterative delivery, and the kind of integration work that makes you appreciate a well-documented API. And deeply frustrated by a poorly documented one.
Our team grew to match. New developers, a new designer, and people who fit the way we work, where design and engineering aren't separate concerns but integrated from the first meeting.
What Changed
Three things shifted this year that we didn't fully anticipate.
Enterprise clients found us. For the first five years, most of our work came through direct relationships and referrals. This year, enterprise organisations started approaching us because they'd heard about our work or seen it in production. The pipeline changed from "who do we know" to "who's looking for exactly what we do." That's a different kind of growth.
Projects got more technical. The briefs we received in 2016 were significantly more complex than even two years ago. Custom portals with role-based access, real-time data dashboards, systems that integrate with three or four existing platforms. The "build us a website" brief has almost entirely been replaced by "build us a system that solves this problem." We wrote about this shift in The Five-Page Website Is Dead, and it accelerated through 2016.
Design became non-negotiable. Clients who previously treated design as an afterthought started insisting on it. Not because they'd read a blog post about UX, but because they'd been burned by systems their staff wouldn't use. The conversation shifted from "make it look nice" to "make it work for our people." That shift validates everything we've been saying since we started IDESIGN.
What We Learned
Every year teaches us something we didn't expect. Three lessons stood out this year.
Scoping is worth every dollar. We invested more in discovery this year than any previous year, and the payoff was clear. Projects that went through proper discovery ran closer to budget, had fewer scope changes, and delivered outcomes that matched what the client actually needed. We wrote a guide to enterprise scoping based on what we refined this year.
Small teams outperform big ones. Our best project outcomes came from tight teams of 3-5 people with clear roles and direct communication. When we experimented with larger teams, coordination overhead increased faster than output. The lesson: add people only when you've exhausted what a small team can do.
The projects I'm proudest of this year aren't the biggest ones. It disappears.
Rainui Teihotua
Chief Creative Officer
Integration is the hard part. Building new functionality is relatively straightforward. Connecting it to existing systems, legacy databases, third-party APIs, and corporate authentication is where the complexity lives. We've gotten better at scoping for integration, but it remains the area where estimates are hardest and surprises are most common.
The Team
We're careful about who we hire. Not because we're exclusive, but because the way we work depends on people who can operate across disciplines. A developer at IDESIGN needs to understand why a design decision was made, not just how to implement it. A designer needs to understand technical constraints, not just visual principles.
That's a specific kind of person, and they're not easy to find. But the team we've assembled is the strongest we've had. Six years in, we have a group of people who genuinely care about the quality of what they ship.
The team this year delivered things I couldn't have imagined building in 2011. Not because the technology changed that much, but because the people around us got better, and we got better at creating the conditions for them to do their best work.
Isaac Rolfe
Managing Director
Looking Ahead
We don't make public predictions. Too many things we can't control. But the direction is clear.
The NZ tech market is growing. Enterprise clients want bespoke solutions built by teams that understand both the problem and the people. The projects are getting bigger and more complex. And the demand for design-led, technically strong delivery is real, not aspirational.
We'll keep doing what we do. Understand the problem. Put people at the centre. Build things that work and feel right. Grow the team carefully. Take on projects that challenge us.
2016 was the year IDESIGN went from a small studio doing good work to a team doing work that matters at a scale that matters. 2017 is about building on that foundation.
Thanks to our team, our clients, and the people who trust us with problems worth solving. More next year.