Razorfish

I feel hugely privileged to have worked in an environment in which so much innovative and exciting work was being carried out.

Throughout my time at Razorfish, I was a billable resource, spending between 50 and 80% of my time working as a creative lead on projects. In the remaining hours, I built and worked for my team as one of the agency’s managers.

◆ Head of Content Development, Razorfish London
   Projects included: Nokia, Umbro, BP, Razorfish Inc

When I took the job in London, one of my first tasks was to recruit a team of writers that would be capable of creating ideas and content for the huge range of innovative websites being produced for the agency’s clients. (remember these were the days when we had a queue of world class brands waiting to work with us).

I had the freedom to take on the best, most talented, funniest and frankly barking set of oddballs I’d come across.

◆ Content Development Director, Razorfish Europe
   Projects included: Astra Zeneca, Dolphin Telecom, Nokia.

As a result of my success in setting up the writers’ group in Razorfish’s London office, I was asked to lead the development of similar resources across the company’s eight other European offices. This involved recruiting local content development leads where there were none, passing on best practice, providing support on projects, and developing a community amongst the office writing leads so that they could turn to each other for professional and linguistic support.

It’s quite a challenge, believe me, to choose someone to head a team of writers and you can’t speak their language, let alone read what they’ve written.

◆ Creative Director, Razorfish, London
   Clients included: Vodafone, Decca, Panalpina, Group 3G

I returned to work as part of the London team, just at the point when the bubble was bursting.

I was invited to take up this interim position (taking over briefly from the inspirational Olof Schybergson as creative director) in order to provide Razorfish’s creative team (visual designers, writers, information architects, interface developers, user intelligence) with stability.

My time in the post included managing the reduction of the group from 57 people to 12 when the company experienced an unprecedented fall-off in revenue. I managed three waves of voluntary redundancy, each time succeeding in keeping the strongest personnel (with no financial incentive), and helping them to produce excellent creative work.

I eventually took the redundancy option myself, knackered and not a little sad.