The vocabulary
we operate with.

Every engagement runs through the same 8 steps: Diagnose → Map → Standardize → Build → Govern → Ship → Measure → Iterate. Depth of each step scales with engagement size; the sequence stays constant. That constancy is what makes the work predictable across 47 locations or 470.

Design ops is the system that decides what gets briefed, by whom, in what format, with what approval gates, in what order, to what standards - not the design itself. It's the difference between hiring designers and building a working creative organization.

Operational design work for brands running 30-300+ locations, venues, properties, or simultaneous campaigns. Distinct from single-location brand work because the bottleneck is never creative - it's coordination, governance, and variant management across many parallel threads.

Three sequential approval gates. Gate 1 (Master): one approved concept, internal r352 sign-off. Gate 2 (Variant): mid-level client approval per location or campaign variant. Gate 3 (Pre-production): senior client sign-off before final production. Without these gates, multi-location launches collapse into 200-email threads with directors who are in the office 2 days a week.

Brief volume = how many design or campaign requests your team processes per period. Decision velocity = average time from a brief landing to an approved direction. Multiply them - that's your real creative throughput. Hiring more designers raises volume capacity but doesn't fix velocity. The bottleneck is almost always decision velocity.

Agencies sell creative deliverables, billed hourly or per project, with success measured in awards and portfolio. Operators sell working systems, billed productized or via retainer, with success measured in operational metrics (ops time reduced, decision velocity, brand consistency score). r352 is the latter.

Tribal knowledge is what happens when a senior designer becomes the only person who knows how briefs get triaged, where the master files live, which director approves what. When that person leaves, the new hire spends 3 months reverse-engineering everything. Multi-location brands pay this cost cyclically - and rarely line-item it.

Every Monday brief. Every Thursday async check-in. Every Friday delivery pack drop. Quarterly review. The cadence is the product - it's what lets clients plan around r352's output instead of waiting for the next big reveal. The opposite is the heroic launch model: months of silence followed by one big drop, which doesn't survive contact with multi-location reality.

Fixed €2k engagement, 5 working days. We audit your current design operations - stakeholder interviews, 5-7 prioritized bottlenecks - and deliver a one-page written diagnosis with a 60-day roadmap. 60-day money-back guarantee if recommendations aren't actionable. Often used as a low-commitment fit test before a full Sprint or Operating Partner engagement.

From €15k, defined scope, fixed price. Used when there's a known deliverable to ship - a new operating system, a campaign toolkit, a brief intake process. Sprints don't drift; if scope grows, it becomes a new sprint with a separate scope agreement.

From €7k/mo, 30-day notice, scope reviewed quarterly. Used when there's a continuous operational layer that needs ongoing maintenance - weekly briefs, governance reviews, ad-hoc problem solving. Most r352 engagements settle into Retainer after an initial Sprint.

From €55k. Used for full design operations rollouts across 30-300+ locations - brand standardization, brief intake redesign, governance gate implementation, training of internal teams. Includes pre-production support and post-rollout audit.

From €9.5k/mo, 12-month minimum. r352 becomes the de facto design operations lead inside the client organization - attending leadership reviews, owning the operating system, hiring decisions for the design team, vendor selection. Closest model to having a head of design ops without making it a hire.

Every Friday at 17:00 CET, the client receives a delivery pack: folder of finished assets, 8-minute Loom walkthrough, one-page summary of what shipped and what's next. The delivery pack is the heartbeat of the engagement - when it's late, something has gone wrong with the system, not with the work.

Every r3loop step ends with one binary question - a decision gate. Diagnose closes with "do we know which friction point costs the most?" Standardize closes with "can a new hire produce an on-standard brief without asking anyone?" If the answer is no, the step isn't done - no amount of activity substitutes for the gate. Decision gates are what keep the loop honest: they convert open-ended consulting work into a sequence of verifiable checkpoints.

Each step in r3loop owes the next step a defined artifact in a defined format - that's its output contract. Diagnose owes a ranked friction-point list. Standardize owes templates plus a QA checklist. Measure owes a KPI baseline. Because the contract specifies structure, not just content, outputs are reusable across engagements - and productizable: the same output contract that feeds a client rollout can feed a tool. Work that doesn't fulfill its contract doesn't move downstream.

The presence curve describes how much of the operator's (r352's) hands-on involvement each r3loop step requires. Diagnose runs at roughly 90% operator presence - interviews, judgment, synthesis. By Measure and Iterate, presence drops to around 15%: the system, templates, and the client's own team carry the work, with r352 reviewing exceptions. The declining curve is the point of the engagement - if operator presence stays flat, you've bought a dependency, not a system.