Erik: How has working for different-sized firms shaped your consulting career development?

Lauren: I’ve never worked at a corporation, so I’ve never been on the client side, but I – I’ve always either worked at startups earlier in my career and as a teenager, I was at startups, with me and one or two other people. Then I moved into this company, Lextant, which was about 30 people, but still a consultancy. And I’m now at Frog, which our office has about 160 people, but globally, I think we have like 600. I learned kind of early on that to wear a lot of hats. I think that it was the perfect kind of crescendo for me in terms of challenging me in the right ways. You know, these smaller companies, I had to wear a lot of hats but I always had the person who started the company with tons of experience, who knew that I was young, and knew that I had a lot to learn, and they were always there. They were always supportive. And so it was a very close kind of working relationship. And so I was able to learn from a master essentially as an apprentice, then I also had to learn kind of the nitty-gritty stuff, all the little gnarly things. You know, I had to do this stuff, and I had to like manage Excel sheets, and weird stuff that I don’t have to do now that I kind of moved my way into a medium, not a small size, consultancy, Lextant, and it was a little bit more of a disconnect from the nitty-gritty but still small enough where I was able to understand what was going on, and like see what clients were coming in and out, really understand like the building cycle, understand like how projects were scoped, how we got people to align with us creatively, so there was a lot of visibility into that. And now that I know those things and I work at Frog, I’m able to have that awareness that I wouldn’t have had. If I wouldn’t have to come to Frog, it’s very – we’re broken up in such a way because we’re so large that the creative team often time does not have a lot of exposure, to the kind of, the underpinnings of the organization, which I think is – it’s really important to understand, as a creative, how your job ultimately fits into the machine, you know, how, what I’m making, why I’m being billed this much, why the client is asking for these things, who’s writing proposals, how they’re scoping stuff. So I was able to come to that with a fundamental understanding and know the questions to ask of the people that are doing those jobs that I don’t necessarily interface with all the time. So it’s challenged me in a great way, and now, I can kind of know where I can pull and push, and I know who to go to when I need things, and it has been really beneficial because I can speak to a lot more than somebody who came into a big organization right off the bat. And also, with clients, I can come into a client conversation, have a little bit more of a grounded understanding and not as much as somebody that does that for a living but I’ve done it before on a smaller capacity. So I think there was this great kind of building of challenges. And now I could focus more on challenging myself professionally as a creative and less on trying to learn those things and how the company works. I can really think about what do I wanna do to leverage this amazing global innovation firm that does these great products, to learn more, and to be a better designer for them.