I worked at Forrester for seven years, progressing from associate designer to a senior designer and manager to a team of five designers in Consulting.
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In the spring of 2017, I took a job as an associate graphic designer with Forrester, a global research and advisory program. The consulting team hired me as part of an initiative to enhance the design and functionality of their deliverable portfolio. The subtext was that the quality of consulting’s design work wasn’t up to par with the quality of their writing or the magnitude of Forrester’s business (around $500 million annually).
In 2018, after being promoted to a graphic designer position, I became the only designer left on staff and was given more freedom and authority to take control of our branding within the larger Forrester ecosystem. At this level, I balanced a quickly churning queue of client-facing deliverables (a lot of research reports, custom content marketing assets, social content, and sales presentations) with hiring two other associate level designers and starting to build out our team.
In 2020, I was promoted to senior graphic designer and given more responsibility to start collaborating with leaders within consulting’s different practices. As a result of working with them to identify weaknesses and opportunities for high-quality design work, we started to redesign the entire portfolio of content marketing deliverables, namely the examples below (Thought Leadership Papers, Opportunity Snapshots, and Infographics). We took the existing deliverable structures and focused on making changes to improve clarity of reading, conciseness of data visualization, and overall visual impact while not getting in the way of consultant writing.
In 2022, with more hiring on the horizon (plus 3 designers to bring our total to 5), I stepped into a team lead role and started working to develop our team’s talent and collaboration. I delegated work to my teammates while also learning and cultivating their unique skill sets. In this position, I was able to accomplish more to improve the quality of consulting work than ever before.
During this time, I also found my own passion for developing templates, documentation, and resources that enabled our team to work efficiently and effectively. I created InDesign templates with baked-in paragraph/character styles, swatches, and grids/guidelines, then developed documentation on how to utilize these templates successfully. We drafted process documents for the consultants to follow and standard SLA times that we promised we could create high quality work in. We built an internal template library within Adobe CC Libraries that was constantly being updated, as well as a consultant-facing template library with typography/color guidance and character counts. I truly enjoy working in this capacity.
Also during 2022 (it was a wild time), we transitioned from directly reporting into consulting to a larger digital production team at Forrester.
In 2023, in the midst of that transition, I was promoted to manager of my team and officially took on my five teammates as employees. I was able to build on already-established relationships with my team and create a culture of light-heartedness and a combination of collaboration and individual discipline. Working with this team was consistently the highlight of my work with Forrester. They produced incredible work and developed a reputation outside of our team for playing hard and working even harder (to lean on a cliche). We pushed each other to do better and had a lot of fun doing it.
To be able to watch a team grow over the course of 7 years while being trusted to craft that development was truly an honor. Below, I’ve shared some examples of the work we were able to accomplish during that time, although it only represents a small fraction of the volume of our work and impact that this team made on Forrester.
