Wallace Design Collective

Wallace’s biggest challenge has been its growth and expansion. "We would hire 20 more engineers today if we could find them," Phillips said. But managing and coordinating that many people is a challenge. Before Mosaic, Phillips managed his team using Google Calendars. "We would list everyone’s basic, high-level things they’d be working on for each respective day, along with how many hours we expected them to spend on each." According to Phillips, they would meet with all the project managers to "shuffle the deck and make sure we have everyone allocated to projects—and their days full." While this process worked pretty well when their team was only 20 people, by the time they were nearing 50 employees across multiple offices with shared work across several different principals, things got complicated—and expensive. "Our manpower meeting was beginning to get longer and longer." And having so many "highly compensated individuals sitting around the table for an hour or two each week" making sure everyone is working on the right thing is "quite an investment."

According to Phillips, the Wallace team "is pretty unique in that we’re a well-matched group. Everyone works well together, respects each other, and is really pretty willing to do whatever it takes to help keep everyone successful. That’s gotten us quite a bit further down the road than we would have gone otherwise. But even that gets challenged when you’re not able to quickly communicate to know who’s available and who has the skills available to help solve the problem." Ultimately, Phillips knew that if the company was going to grow like they envisioned, they needed another solution—and that’s where Mosaic came in.

The thing that the team liked most about Mosaic was that it was tailored specifically to meet Wallace’s needs, and it did so "elegantly." According to Phillips, Mosaic was also at an appealing point in its development: It had enough of a track record to give Phillips confidence that it would be successful, but it was still early enough that customers like Wallace would have the opportunity to help shape its future. Without having adopted Mosaic, Phillips "would be less optimistic that his team could cross-pollinate and share resources among all their offices and groups." 

Fortunately, the process of getting buy-in from his team—and pulling the trigger on Mosaic—was "a pretty easy, effortless thing." And the reception to Mosaic has been great: "Everyone wants to use it, and everyone intends to." Plus, the Mosaic team has "made themselves completely available any time we need them," Phillips said. That has been particularly helpful because the Wallace team has incrementally onboarded the product to accommodate busy schedules and heavy workloads. "I’ve been picking people off individually and working them through things, bringing them onboard one or two at a time versus larger groups," he said. Another helpful feature for the Wallace team has been the videos that Mosaic has released to introduce new tools.