Liam posted last week that we are in the process of closing down Lagom Strategy.

In many ways it’s a sad time because the business has been a big part of my life. Liam established Lagom 12 years ago. I turned up 7 years ago, first as an associate, and then later as a director alongside Liam and Helen.

We devoted ourselves to building a great business, making digital public services more user centred, and doing it all in a lagom way.

We built a great team: user researchers, service designers and delivery managers. And I think we did some genuinely brilliant pieces of work for our NHS, central government, and public sector-adjacent clients.

So I do feel sad that it’s ending. But not too sad. All things change, and Lagom may have just come to a natural end point.

As Liam said, the pendulum swing away from SMEs like Lagom in public sector procurement had already affected the work we were able to win. We managed to keep winning work for longer than some, but it had definitely got harder. And a lot of our work was with, or via, NHS England, which has been in a fairly constant process of change, making some of our best work frustratingly uncertain.

We had already reduced the size of our team to reflect this new reality. My own recent period of compassionate absence wasn’t decisive, but it wasn’t very helpful timing.

So we stopped trying to win work a little while ago, and we’re now well into the process of closing the business down.

As we do so, I think we can feel good about the work we’ve done. Personally, I feel extremely grateful that Helen and Liam invited me to join them. The Lagom ethos (do good things, advocate for the user above all else, quality over quantity…) was already established when I joined. But I found that it suited me very well, enabling me to do the most rewarding work, in a way that made sense to me, with people I really enjoyed working with.

I think we were at our best delivering gnarly, difficult discovery projects, where most of the work was user research, but mixed in with a dash of politics, and some tricky tech and design options.

We did our share of more straightforward pieces of work too, but they were less satisfying. I think the Lagom team came into its own when we found some big ideas, a set of genuine of problems to solve, a distracted client, some awkward stakeholders, and users who barely had time to participate in our research. Our work on clinical placements for NHS England was like this. Really important; maddening at times; and a brilliant Lagom team quietly making sense of it all.

Lagom was never just the work though. I’ll miss the catch ups, the team days, the Hot Topics, the quick debriefs, the virtual coffees. I reckon we did a lot of things right.

I am very thankful to have worked with a great team. I loved working with Adam, Charlotte, Emma, Hannah, James, John and Victoria. Reducing the size of the team was a painful experience, however lagom we might have wanted to be about it.

And I’ve been extremely grateful to Liam and Helen during the last few months in particular, when their support has enabled me to step back, despite the pressures it must have created on them.

I don’t know what’s next yet. I don’t have a job to go to, or much of a plan. But whatever we all do, I hope it will still be lagom.