Jeff Eaton and Karen McGrane are two good, dear friends: they’re smart, they’re hilarious, and they’re incredibly generous teachers. I’ve learned so much from them both over the years, and I’ve been so grateful to have had the chance to work with them on client projects, like the redesigns of EYP and The Toast.

And as of Friday, we’ve launched a strategic consultancy together. We’re calling it Autogram, and I’d like to tell you why.

Karen, Jeff, and I started chatting last year, comparing notes of what we’d seen at the companies we worked with. There are a lot of encouraging trends, mind you — design systems tooling has matured alongside other advances, like headless CMSes, which have improved a lot of digital processes. But there are lots of pain points, too: effective practices produced by one team rarely scale across the wider organization, often hampered by politics and company silos. At the end of the day, many organizations feeling like their massive design and platform investments hadn’t paid off — instead, they’re sifting through broken workflows and visibility problems.

The more we chatted, the more excited we got. Because frankly, there were some pretty common patterns at the heart of these issues. That’s why Autogram is focused on the overlap between three problem areas:

  • Content management and services platforms;
  • Digital design systems;
  • Digital strategy and governance at scale.

Many organizations see these as discrete, separate systems. But of course, they’re tightly linked — and Karen, Jeff, and I have decades of experience thinking through and across these problem areas, especially at scale. If these challenges sound familiar to you, send us an email — we’d love to hear more.

Autogram

Hi, folks. We’re Autogram. It’s very nice to meet you, and we’re excited about what comes next.