How to Work with a UX Agency: A Buyer's Guide for Product Teams

Hiring a UX agency is easy. Getting great work out of one is a skill, and most buyers have never been taught it. You’re My Favorite Client is the missing manual. Here is its wisdom, adapted for teams buying UX work.

How should you write the brief?

Define goals and constraints, not solutions. “Increase checkout completion by reducing friction for first-time mobile buyers” gives an agency something to solve. “Redesign the checkout to look modern” gives them something to decorate. Include what success looks like, what you know about your users, and what is genuinely off-limits. The brief is the single biggest predictor of engagement quality.

How should you choose?

Look past portfolio visuals to process and thinking. Ask how they research, how they handle disagreement, what they do when data contradicts their instincts. And appoint one empowered decision-maker on your side. Agencies cannot design around a committee; Monteiro is blunt that design by approval chain produces work nobody loves.

How should you behave during the work?

• Give feedback about problems, not solutions. “First-time users may not notice this” is useful. “Move it left” is a guess.

• Judge against the goals you set. Not against your personal taste or a competitor you saw last week.

• Stay engaged. The big-reveal model, where the agency disappears for two months, fails because design needs your domain knowledge continuously.

Why does Tremoloo share this book?

Because it makes our clients better buyers of our own work, which makes the work better. That is not altruism. It is how good design actually happens.

Looking for a UX partner who works this way? Meet our product design team.