When to hire a design agency?

I’ve had several opportunities to engage with design agencies in my career and I’m starting to form some decently weighted opinions on when and how to do so.

When to hire an agency:

• When you have more money than people
• When you can’t afford to manage creative talent (they’re quite an undertaking)
• When you’re leaping into unknown territory (they are great with contextual research)
• When you want to shake things up
• When you want to bring left field closer to homeplate
• When your brand is not terribly explicit or the project can be a shade off brand (only “innies” know the brand that well)
• When you’re not sure what you are looking for
• When you have an idea but aren’t sure where to take it
• When you need a one stop shop - strategy to execution (if you hire the right agency)
• If you want something shiny that you’ll never build

When to rely on in house creative talent:

• When you have an existing product with a loyal following
• When you REALLY care about your brand and making sure every part of the user experience speaks to it
• When you have a super sensitive creative team that can’t handle another fish in the tank
• When the leadership team knows pretty much exactly what they want
• When you need something to hand to outsourced development
• When it’s going to take more than 6 months to build the outcome
• When your organization needs to be gently cohersed into drastic change

It’s a work in progress, but I like the first stab :-)
No offense towards my friends at agencies and these are only my thoughts, not those of any company I do or have worked for.