Makers #11: Asif Mir and Manuela Duque

Making decisions. 

Manuela: We have difficult conversations every day. We’re always thinking six months ahead, and the most challenging part is aligning on the vision. That’s where we invest the most and where we have the most candid conversations. Once we have that shared vision, the next step is translating it for the team so everyone understands what we’re trying to achieve. 

A recent example: we’d just come out of a planning session with the clients and we wanted to bring this idea of how the future of the web will work. We developed a concept we called Adapted Site Experiences, which is a new way of navigating content, built around how users are using AI to communicate and how the web should evolve to meet those new behaviors.  

The idea was ambitious enough that it was genuinely challenging to bring the teams to the same level of understanding. But that process of translating the idea, working through it together, is what got us to a place where we could bring it to the client—and they were blown away.

We’ve been working together for a couple of years now and the sites look and feel very different. We’ve won Creativepool and Webby Awards. But for me the hardest question is always: where do we want to invest? Where do we push further? 

Asif: A little friction is healthy. We push each other to get the best results for our clients. We remove our ego from the work. It’s not about what I want to do creatively or what you want to do as a product person — it’s about what’s going to drive the best outcomes. 

The Adaptive Site Experience was a complex idea. We had a decision to make: do we narrow it down to make it easier to communicate, or do we find a way to land it in its purest form? We chose the latter. The challenge was getting the team there—how does the idea come to life? How do people really understand it?

We had done this work proactively, as an additional ask. The client had no idea. An hour before we showed the work, they were in the room talking about those exact challenges—how the web is changing and what to do about it. Then we rolled it out and they said “you've solved our problem.” Anyone can take orders and deliver, but when clients see you doing work they didn’t ask for, that’s when they stop seeing you as a vendor and start seeing you as a partner.

Balancing creativity with buildable. 

Asif: Creative and product are two different disciplines that are trying to balance what the ambition is and what we want to build, but because our roles are so fluid, the first thing we do is fall in love with the problem, not a solution. We take a step back, find the problem, fall in love with it, and then get creative and product aligned. 

We try to avoid patterns. We always approach a brief differently. We look at the problem and let that how it should be tackled rather than having a cookie cutter solution. Instead, we’d rather scrap that and create our own process from scratch. 

Manuela: The problem is the first thing we hold ourselves accountable to—and how we want to measure it. What are our hypotheses? What are our bets? The conversation we keep coming back to is: what do we want to solve for the users? Is this really going to move the needle? When we answer those questions, it becomes easier to drop things that are just noise.

One example was the personalization of Chrome Enterprise. Most users came to the site, downloaded the browser and left. When they came back, the experience was exactly the same—nothing to move them further along their journey to other products.

We solved it with a tailored narrative for users we already knew had downloaded the browser. We personalized the thank you page based on traffic and user behaviour, updated the hero, and led with a new narrative. When we launched it, the results were significant. Core signups increased and the project went on to win a Webby Award this year.

How to not be cookie cutter.

Asif: You need to lead by example. If we always approach the problems the same way, the team will mirror that. So we make a point of showing a different approach every time—we’ll look at the last brief, talk through how we tackled it, and then show how we’re thinking about this one differently. 

The team doesn’t need to be forced—they buy into it. The most rewarding moment is seeing teams mirror that behaviour, seeing collaboration across disciplines that might have felt opposing, and then realizing: if it works here, why not build that kind of partnership everywhere?

Manuela: It’s also about building a mindset and teaching people to work within it. And it’s about how we cast our teams—what type of personalities, specific abilities, not only the role and their title, but their specific background and how they work. 

We have a rockstar team right now and we’re proud of them. They go beyond the ask, and that’s about training people to think a certain way. AI will speed up the process and generate multiple solutions but the thinking behind it is what adds the real value. So, how do we teach the team to collaborate with AI responsibly? They have to be the ones to own the conversation. They have to be in the driver’s seat.

Asif: We don’t go by job title. Some of our accounts are complex, with lots of stakeholders and a relentless pace–and we’ve seen people feel the weight of that. We look for certain characteristics in people, not just the skill set. 

You can teach anyone a skill, but curiosity is something that you can’t teach. Being genuinely curious across every discipline: creativity, the client’s problem, strategy, product. Not being defined by your role or being a one-trick pony. That’s what unlocks everything else. That’s what we’re really looking for.

When you build high-functioning teams, they’re not dependent on you all the time and that comes back to ego. Sometimes the most senior person wants to be the loudest voice in the room. We’re the opposite. We’ve set up a process and a team that can do all of those things. Our job is to step back, guide, and nudge them back on track when needed.

AI in practice. 

Manuela: AI has pushed further what we were already talking about—the blending of roles—and we’re dancing with it. For us, AI has simply accelerated what we were already doing. We can move faster, iterate quicker, resolve things sooner. But underneath all of it is the critical thinking we’ve been building in ourselves and in our teams.

It’s a natural progression, AI just speeds that up. But the mindset and the process still have to be there. The team needs to know: what do I need to ask, how do I ask it, how do I test whether the answer is right. The question we keep asking is: how do we empower the team to do the same? So it feels safe, fun and something worth building on.

Asif: AI is a crazy paradox. When everyone can generate a thousand ideas a minute, it doesn’t make everyone a creator but it makes your judgment more valuable.

AI has made doing cheaper, but it’s made thinking more expensive. The machine can perform a task, speed up a flow, open your mind to a problem. But the foundation of how good the AI is, is how good your critical thinking is. How good your questioning is. How good your judgment is. That’s where the value lives. That’s the direction we should all be moving in.

Manuela: We’re already seeing it— people using AI and bringing back work that isn’t always good. The question we keep coming back to is: What were you trying to solve? What parameters were you using to test whether it’s right? You can do whatever you want with these tools, but it won’t always be great if you’re not prepared for greatness. If you don’t know what great looks like, you won’t recognize it when it’s missing.

Asif: AI will not replace human connection. It’s made human taste, critical thinking, curiosity, and the connection between people even more important. Manu and I see it as an enabler—new opportunities, new ways of thinking. And that’s where we’ll leave it.