For 15 years, Kelly Campbell owned her own digital agency, weathering the usual ups and downs while also starting her own holistic health and wellness platform. After selling both companies, she sought a new venture, one that would allow her to use her talents for good while feeding her passion for helping people.

Today, Kelly is an agency growth consultant who helps digital shops to hone in on four focus areas and transform their businesses. With a firsthand understanding of what it’s like to start, scale and sell an agency, she's helping others to do the same. Tune in to hear Kelly share her take on the two biggest challenges agencies face and why it’s important that owners put their oxygen masks on first.

Aaron Draplin always has a record on. Over the course of a day, he chops away at his to-do list, working away in his backyard studio until the late hours of the evening.

So what keeps one of the most respected designers in the industry going? As he says, it’s the understanding that this isn’t forever. And when he’s not getting things done or on the road speaking, Aaron likes to do what most of us enjoy: spend time with family and friends, listen to music, complain about Netflix and so on.

Aaron joins us to talk about Pretty Much Everything, from Dylan to Shepard Fairey, getting your priorities straight and working the crowd.

Warning: This podcast contains strong and hilarious language.

There are those serendipitous moments where everything just clicks. After working in the CMS industry (ExpressionEngine, Craft CMS) for two decades, Leslie Camacho kept coming back to an idea for a consulting service that gave agencies better decision making data. On the ground at Owner Summit in Austin, he connected with a Dutch company called VOGSY that was bringing that idea to life.

Today, as VP of Customer Services at VOGSY, Leslie is helping digital shops to gain visibility into what is and isn’t working, to get ahead of problems before it’s too late. Leslie joins us to talk about business intelligence, how shops are getting smarter and the cultural implications and impact of getting serious about ambitious goals.

From VapoRub to Pampers and Swiffer, P&G has been innovating for over 180 years. Today, they’re out to reinvent the way they connect and deliver value to consumers via digital: IoT, AI, machine learning, big data, AR/VR, mobile and other cutting-edge technologies. At the center of this ambitious vision is an internal agency called Alchemy.

Separate but funded by P&G, Alchemy thinks and operates like a startup or creative firm. But they’re up against unique challenges and expectations. Working on some of the biggest brands in the world, potential revenue can run in the tens of millions, or even billions. And that’s a lot of pressure. Paul Armstrong, Alchemy’s Head of Design, shares how Alchemy came about, what led him to join and what might be next as the global behemoth continues to reimagine our day-to-day as we know it.

As a digital maker, leader or even digital agency owner, you may feel that you’re lower on the client project decision-making chain than you would like to be…That you’re just building what people tell you to build, without really examining the problem and determining the right solution.

Like many digital shops, Crush & Lovely has experienced this disconnect. With a solid reputation for video, web, mobile and other digital solutions, they’ve shifted their focus to high-level strategy with execution. Not just for a project or team, but across entire companies. CEO & Co-founder Matt Blanchard and Managing Director Mazin Melegy join us to talk about what an impact agency is, and how Crush & Lovely fulfills a vital business need.

You get into design because you love the work. But now, as a design leader, your job is running a team, running projects, operating out of habit and responsibility. Responding to emails, scrolling screens, beholden to Slack and everyone else's needs. As the gap between how you spend your day and what's most important to you widens, you start to feel more and more burned out.

And for good reason. According to Dr. Sherry Walling, your reaction is perfectly understandable and reasonable. Founder of ZenFounder and author of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together, Dr. Walling has tips to help you mitigate the effects of burnout. Tune in to find out how you can add more interest and meaning to your work, and how to get back to feeling that creative joy.

What does it take to be a great design leader? Ask Alastair Simpson, Head of Design at Atlassian, and his answers may surprise you. To Alastair, great leadership—and great design—come down to communication. Journeying from his first job at a call center to the helm of a 70-person design team, Alastair has found communication to be the linchpin of success.

As a design leader, Alastair also shrugs off top-down decision making. His goal is to make zero decisions for his team. Tune in to learn more about his leadership approach, how direct feedback can make you a better leader and the importance of having a real life outside of your job.

Get a bunch of Harvard grads together, and amazing things are bound to happen. That’s certainly true of DEV, the largest student-run company in the world. Affiliated but independent of Harvard, DEV is the web and app development arm of Harvard Student Agencies. The company employs more than 650 undergraduates annually, including DEV’s one and only full-time team member, Chief Helpfulness Officer Spencer Tiberi.

Spencer joins us to talk about DEV as a multi-million dollar non-profit: how the organization is turning profits into scholarships, and what it’s like working in an “almost chaotic” environment. Tune in to learn more about DEV, the nature of their business and where they’re headed next.

Mariah Hay started her career designing luggage and soft goods. With the advent of the iPhone, human-centered design jumped front and center, not just for product designers like Mariah, but for the digital space. Problem was, and still is, that ethics typically isn’t part of a designer’s education. Rapidly creating and iterating, designers can find they’ve created a monster without even realizing it.

How can we help people access experiences, and how do we end up blocking people from critical services and information, such as medical records, legal systems or education? As the Head of Practices at Pluralsight, Mariah often asks herself this question. Mariah joins us to talk about awareness and aptitude, identifying blind spots and asking for help when it feels like you might be missing something.

At Google, you might have a team of 300 engineers, two dozen designers, 10 researchers and a handful of product and project managers. All unique humans with different opinions and ideas. All working together on enormously broad, complex problems. Clipping away at a speed of maximum velocity.

Given the scope, speed, team size and sheer messiness of human nature, this might sound like a recipe for disaster. But it’s actually intentional by design, a fine-tuned system based on a simple truth: cross-functional collaboration creates better products.

If Google can do it, why do so many of us struggle to work together across our teams? Vivian Sarratt, Head of UX Operations at Google, joins us to spill some of the secrets to success. Tune in to explore the complicated relationship of collaboration and strategies to make it work.