Dave from Numiko admits the agency used to do what most digital agencies do: hire good people and hope they'd figure it out.
"I think we were setting people up to fail," he says. Remote work made that approach impossible. So Numiko mapped out everything a new hire needs to know, layered across their first six months. The first week covers who does what. The second introduces playbooks. By three months, there are clear expectations for their seniority level. By six, the onboarding hands over to a performance framework.
The pay structure got the same treatment. Salaries had drifted because people who asked loudly got raises and people who didn't were left behind. The gender pay gap was widening for the same reason. Numiko built transparent bands tied to consistent expectations across every team. A lead project manager carries similar responsibility to a lead developer or lead UX designer, and gets paid accordingly.
Margins improved through discipline, not cuts. Numiko specialises in four sectors: museums and galleries, charities, higher education, and public policy. That specialism means they can estimate accurately, turn down work that won't be profitable, and avoid reinventing the wheel.
The menu system was the turning point. A UX designer would make a small change to how a navigation worked. An hour of design time. But it meant the front-end team couldn't reuse existing code, adding a week of build. "I challenged the team to identify the three best ways of doing this thing," Dave says. They standardised interface behaviour across their most common components. Margins nearly tripled.
Listen to the full conversation with Dave on the Happy Teams podcast.
