Voice AI agents are moving from novelty to infrastructure, and the companies building them have a reliability problem nobody talks about. James Zammit co-founded Roark (YC W25) to solve it — and did it with a team of six that counts Google and AT&T among its customers and processes millions of call minutes a month. In Episode 3 of the NoRobots Podcast, Vlad asks him how a company that small lands enterprise clients, and where he thinks voice AI still has no business picking up the phone.

Two startups that were too early

Before Roark there were two others: a music collaboration app in 2015 and a chatbot company in 2018, back when chatbots were universally disliked and the underlying technology simply wasn’t there. James is clear-eyed about why they didn’t work — wrong timing, no domain expertise, and founders who were early in their careers.

Two corrections matter more than the rest. The first is speed. One earlier product took a year and a half to reach its first version, because they wanted it perfect. By launch, either someone had beaten them to it or the thing they’d polished turned out to be something nobody wanted. He borrows an analogy from Michael Seibel: to find a leak in a pipe, you can inspect every inch by hand, or turn on the water and let the leak announce itself.

The second is that they used to believe a great product sells itself. It doesn’t. Distribution and sales matter just as much, and that lesson took a decade.

What Roark actually does

Anyone shipping a voice agent hits the same wall: you change a prompt, and you have no idea what you broke. The only way to find out is to call your own agent, over and over, through dozens of scenarios. James and his co-founder hit this themselves building an agent for a dental clinic, where patients kept getting stuck in loops and failing to confirm insurance.

Roark started as analytics — “the Mixpanel for voice” — and grew into two things: simulation testing that runs an agent through hundreds of scenarios, personas, and accents in parallel inside your CI/CD pipeline, and post-call analysis that scores every real conversation on dozens of metrics and points at what to fix.

How six people landed Google and AT&T

No ads. The mix was outbound to teams building in voice, referrals, published content, and — for some of the larger names — inbound. Then the ordinary sequence: demo, pilot, contract.

The unglamorous truth underneath is that none of that survives a bad product. James keeps returning to the YC line about building something people want: simple to say, hard to actually do.

Twenty agents instead of twenty hires

Roark runs more than twenty internal agents. Three examples give the flavour.

The changelog agent reads the week’s pull requests, drafts the changelog, and takes its own screenshots. Monday morning someone reviews it and sends. Four or five hours of a PM’s week become thirty seconds of attention.

The on-call agent picks up CloudWatch alarms, investigates, and either opens a pull request for a human to review or writes up what it found. The broadcast agent solves a small, real annoyance: Roark keeps a shared Slack channel with each larger customer, and announcements used to mean pasting the same message a dozen times. Now it goes into one channel called Broadcast and fans out, picking up new customer channels by naming convention. Three prompts replaced a job that other companies pay a tool to do.

None of these are impressive alone. That’s the point — they’re the boring work that quietly justifies the next hire.

The unglamorous half: infrastructure

The other half of staying lean is refusing to let engineers lose days to setup. Everything is infrastructure as code, using Pulumi and SST. Every engineer gets a production-like environment with one command, with preview deploys, end-to-end tests, and alerts on everything.

James has worked somewhere that editing a single page meant three days of fighting to get data running. His argument: with today’s coding tools, setting things up properly takes no longer than doing it badly.

Where voice AI should stop

Appointment scheduling, reminders, prescription refill nudges — all fully automatable today, in his view. His line for what shouldn’t be automated is risk-based: if getting it wrong costs a life or a six-figure deal, a human still picks up. Anyone calling in genuine crisis belongs in that category.

He’s equally candid about what still breaks. A bad phone line plus background noise — a human decodes that better. People switching languages mid-sentence. Interruptions, where the hard part isn’t handling them but stopping the agent from rudely cutting the customer off. And pronunciation: ask an agent to read back an email address and watch it mangle the spelling. Entire companies exist to fix just that.

The architecture is shifting underneath all this. For the past year most production systems were cascade models — separate speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech components stitched together. Over the last six months more of Roark’s customers have moved to speech-to-speech models, which handle interruptions so naturally that callers often don’t notice they’re talking to software.

Should the agent admit it’s AI?

James expects regulation to answer part of this, and Roark follows whatever the local law says. His own position is a hybrid: booking a table, nobody cares who answered. Discussing a prescription, probably say it. Finding exactly where that line sits, he admits, is genuinely hard.

His broader thesis is blunter: anyone with a publicly facing phone number will eventually be a voice agent. And there’s an argument that the machine is sometimes better — a legal office that closes at five loses the customer who calls at six, and an agent doesn’t.

Malta, San Francisco, and what YC actually reads

James and his co-founder are both Maltese and moved to San Francisco. His advice on geography: move to where your customers are — New York for finance, London for parts of Europe — but don’t let location stop you from starting. If you won’t relocate, commit to being there a couple of weeks a quarter.

On YC applications, his read is that where you’re from matters far less than where you’ll be during and after the batch. And what they’re really testing isn’t the idea but how you got to it: did you talk to twenty people, do they all have this pain, what are they doing about it now, will they pay. Building blindly on a hunch is the thing that fails.

For the rest of the conversation on where voice AI is heading, see also our episode with Elad Hefetz on how AI is reshaping search and discovery.

Find James at roark.ai or on LinkedIn, and watch the full episode on YouTube.

What does generative engine optimization actually change for a B2B company? Elad Hefetz has been building websites for enterprise tech since 2014, first as CodersClan, now as Airfleet, a 55-person team spread across a dozen countries. In Episode 2 of the NoRobots Podcast, Vlad sits down with Elad to talk about GEO, why AI recommendations rarely come with a link, and the two pieces of advice he thinks marketers should ignore.

Finding the niche by accident

Airfleet started as CodersClan, a paid Q&A platform for developers helping developers. But the people signing up weren’t developers. They were marketers and founders who needed technical help their internal R&D teams were too busy to give.

Marketing teams wanted a landing page, a chatbot, a connection to their automation stack. Engineering was heads-down on the product. That gap turned into a business, and by now the focus is narrow: enterprise tech B2B, where a purchase involves a buying committee of six to ten people and the website has to serve every one of them.

Saying no to money

Narrowing down meant turning away work. Elad is direct about how that felt: the hard part was “saying no to people that are willing to pay you money,” especially when you technically could help them.

What made it easier was thinking in opportunity cost. Take an okay client and you may not be free when a great one shows up. It’s the same instinct Josh Webber described in Episode 1 when he talked about earning the right to say no.

Why WordPress won for them

Airfleet tried plenty of platforms. Around 2020 they bet on Gatsby.js, built their own platform on top of it, and six months later admitted it wasn’t going to work. They migrated seven clients back to WordPress, some of them for free.

The reasoning now is less about technology and more about risk. WordPress is mature, extensible, and there’s no vendor holding the pricing lever. If a hosted builder doubles its price tomorrow, its customers have no move. Next.js with a headless CMS is a fine choice, Elad says, but switching would mean rebuilding years of accumulated capability for no client benefit.

When the package doesn’t fit

Fixed packages work for defined projects: a website, a visual identity, an SEO or GEO engagement. But scope creeps, and some work has no knowable scope at the start.

Their answer is to change the shape of the deal rather than argue about it. Ad hoc projects, hourly work, or an hourly subscription with a flat monthly fee that gives the client access to everything the agency does. Different problems, different contracts.

GEO starts with prompts, not rankings

This is the part most teams get wrong. Everyone wants to appear in ChatGPT. Elad’s reframe: “It’s about appearing for the right audience for the right intent.”

Which means the first task isn’t optimization at all. It’s working out what your buyers actually type into these tools. Airfleet built its own AI visibility platform to track unlimited prompts per client, because off-the-shelf tools cap you at a package. Once you know the prompts, you can see which sources the models lean on, and those sources vary by industry. In cybersecurity it might be a handful of publications, specific Reddit threads, or YouTube.

Mentions are the new backlinks

The structure of GEO mirrors SEO more than people expect. Technical setup, content, third parties. The difference is in the third bucket: “instead of backlinks, it’s about mentions.”

And GEO is influenced more by what’s written about you elsewhere than by your own site, though your site still shapes the sentiment of the answer. The two disciplines aren’t alternatives. As Elad puts it, “You can’t do just SEO or just GEO. It doesn’t exist.”

The shortcut, if there is one: with backlinks, any solid authority site helps. With GEO, the same specific sites keep showing up as sources. Get mentioned there and a citation is close to guaranteed.

AI recommends you. Nobody clicks.

Here’s the measurement trap. Ask an AI for the best agencies in a category and it names three. It usually doesn’t link any of them. So the buyer copies the name, pastes it into Google, and arrives as a branded search.

Which means a working GEO strategy shows up as rising brand searches, more direct traffic, and more LinkedIn activity, not as a traffic spike from chatgpt.com. Judge it by referral traffic alone and you’ll conclude it isn’t working.

On lead quality, Elad hasn’t seen a durable difference. Early on, AI-sourced buyers seemed more educated, but that’s evening out. What has clearly increased is bot traffic and automated spam submissions, which are hard to filter precisely because they look like real browsers.

Two pieces of advice to ignore

First, the AI content pendulum. It swung from “AI content can’t rank” to “automate everything,” and Elad thinks both are wrong: “The truth is somewhere in the middle.” Automate the production work, but publish an actual point of view. Fully automated content sites do show climbing impressions in Search Console, then fall off a cliff.

Second, Wikipedia. Getting listed there is roughly ten times harder than landing on a listicle, and it mostly feeds top-of-funnel prompts where the AI answers the question without naming your brand. His verdict: “it’s not a good use of your time and money.” An ordinary industry listicle does more.

Tel Aviv hours, US clients

Most of Airfleet’s clients are in the US, so Elad runs “two shifts” — one before the kids go to bed and one after. The team is global: 55 people, only nine in Israel, hired wherever the talent is, and almost always full-time rather than per project.

The cultural gap took adjusting to. “We say what we think, we’re very direct” doesn’t always land with US buyers, and he had to learn to frame the same point differently. The upside is that American clients tend to value good service and pay for it, which raises the standard for everything the agency does.

Find Elad at airfleet.co or on LinkedIn, and watch the full episode on YouTube.

How do you grow a marketing agency past the feast-or-famine stage — and keep it growing for almost a decade? Josh Webber has an unusual answer: do it with your brothers. He co-founded Big Red Jelly in 2017 after selling his first company, and has since built it into an Inc. 5000 agency with 33 in-house employees. In Episode 1 of the NoRobots Podcast, Vlad — co-founder of NoRobots and Digital Octane — sits down with Josh to unpack the decisions behind that growth: pricing, hiring, AI, and the clients he now turns away. Watch the full conversation above, or read the highlights below.

Working with family: swim lanes and “professional mode”

Running an agency with two brothers sounds like a recipe for conflict, and Josh doesn’t sugarcoat it: “there’s probably more cons than pros.” What fixed the early bumps was treating the company like a company — clear areas of responsibility, or “swim lanes,” with real job titles, descriptions, and KPIs for each co-founder.

Debates still happen. The rule that keeps them productive: “when we come to work, it’s professional mode, nothing’s personal.” One brother even left for a few years to do business development elsewhere — and rejoined six months ago, reuniting all three.

Cutting the fluff and working from the client’s P&L

Josh started Big Red Jelly partly out of frustration with big-agency inefficiency — vague line items like “strategy” and “creative” that clients pay for without seeing a practical benefit. His fix is to reverse-engineer every engagement from the client’s P&L: even a rebrand has to connect to conversion rates, the sales cycle, and revenue.

He’s candid that world-class freelancers are often the cheaper, more efficient option, which means an agency has to justify itself with outcomes: “everything that we do has got to impact the top and bottom line.” As performance marketing normalized paying for results rather than deliverables, that bar only got higher.

AI, GEO, and the rising value of human connection

Big Red Jelly now works with GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — visibility in ChatGPT and Claude — alongside classic SEO. Josh’s framing, borrowed from Good to Great: technology is an accelerant. “It’s rocket fuel as opposed to gasoline” — AI amplifies whatever strategy, processes, and people you already have, good or bad.

Prospects increasingly show up with AI-built websites that get roughly “eighty percent of the way there.” The agency’s job is the last stretch: industry expertise, the right inputs, and turning a generic build into something that actually converts. In Josh’s view, the more AI does, the more clients crave a human who understands their business and simplifies a complicated landscape.

Agency pricing: bronze, silver, gold — then the shift to retainers

When COVID hit, about a third of Big Red Jelly’s recurring clients paused within a week. The team responded by niching down to one-time brand and build projects, priced in bronze/silver/gold tiers — guardrails for the sales team, with a deposit (ideally full payment) up front. Positioned correctly, more clients accept upfront payment than most founders expect.

Recently the agency pivoted again, leading with its ongoing “grow” service: two months up front, then a monthly retainer on a six- or twelve-month contract. “Recurring revenue is just such a nice thing” — easier to plan, staff, and schedule around.

Client red flags: earning the right to say no

As you grow, “you start to earn the right to say no more.” Josh’s number-one red flag: clients who hire experts and then dictate every move. His analogy — you don’t stand over a plumber’s shoulder telling him which screw to use. Holding that line, ironically, often closes more deals by establishing expert status.

Red flag number two: payment terms. Net-60 requests, no deposit, or “pay when it’s delivered” are dealbreakers now, even though they were tempting to accept in the early hustle years. For more on picking the right clients in the first place, see the client acquisition strategies agencies swear by.

Hiring when one role gets 800 applications

Both Vlad and Josh have watched job postings balloon from ~50 applicants to 700–800, with the same three or four genuinely suitable candidates. Josh’s filters: a walkthrough video inside the job description that answers all the usual first-call questions, then a simple ask — email your resume, portfolio, and a short video on why you’re a fit. Half never reply, filtering themselves out.

Big Red Jelly is also relaunching its paid internship program: three months is enough to see the intangibles — hard-working, smart, curious — and it doubles as a recruiting pipeline from Utah Valley’s talent pool.

Utah’s Silicon Slopes: edge or constraint?

Being in Utah rather than New York or LA is, on balance, an advantage: East and West Coast companies hire Big Red Jelly because it’s more affordable yet still US-based, and Silicon Slopes supplies talent and an entrepreneurial ecosystem. The trade-off is proximity to deal flow — Josh admits a year in NYC or LA would mean closing “deals like crazy.” His investor-style workaround: watch the next up-and-coming hubs, like Nashville, Charlotte, and Tampa Bay.

Advice for new founders

Starting over today, Josh would niche down faster, build strategic partnerships early, and spend his time on exactly two things: sales and marketing, and recruiting A-players. On the operational side of that, see when agencies should stop, restart, or hold the line and what running a digital agency actually teaches you.

For individuals entering the field, his bar is simple: technical skills get you the job, but “soft skills will get you promoted.” And the Big Red Jelly tagline that applies to any career: “be the best at everything that requires zero talent” — punctual, proactive, communicative, curious. Do that consistently, and you outpace most of your peers.

Find Josh at bigredjelly.com or on LinkedIn, and watch the full episode on YouTube.

Most agency advice sounds the same: niche down, processize early, charge what you’re worth. Tory Gray, Founder and CEO of Gray Dot Co, has spent over 13 years running a digital agency after starting out in-house at startups – and she built her own woman-owned, value-driven consultancy by questioning most of that advice. Her answers to our questions are the kind you don’t usually get from someone still trying to impress you.

What’s a failure that significantly changed how you run your agency?

One of my most cringe-worthy early moments was presenting an SEO growth strategy to an exec team for the first time as an in-house marketing manager. It was nerve-wracking on its own, but what made it worse was that what I was presenting was, honestly, more a list of tactics than a real strategy. Several to-dos, and many reasons why, but nothing connecting the dots in between.

I didn’t yet understand the gap I created. While the to do list was, in fact, well-informed by my knowledge and understanding, I didn’t understand that the exec team didn’t have that context and trust and experience already. They can’t leap from point A to point B without that insight, and therefore I set them up for failure. Or, more accurately, my own, as they opted not to move forward with the plan.

That experience was uncomfortable but formative. It pushed me to get much better at telling the story – not just what we recommend, but why it matters and how it all fits together.

What’s the most difficult conversation you’ve had with a client?

The hardest conversations are usually the ones where I have to tell a client that the SEO work we’re doing isn’t going to move the needle – not because the work is bad, but because it hasn’t been implemented.

I’ve said this a lot: SEO isn’t magic; if you don’t deploy the work, nothing will change. Considering the SEO growth curve, time is of the essence. Waiting a month for perfection really just means you’ve lost a month of trajectory.

Getting there sometimes means a very direct conversation with leadership about where the bottleneck actually is. No one likes to be the blocker!

But I’d rather have that conversation than collect a paycheck that offers no ROI for the client. That sets everyone up for long-term failure and disappointment.

What’s a belief you had early on that you no longer agree with?

I used to think value-based pricing was the gold standard: the thing you graduated to once you’d “made it” as an agency. I don’t believe that anymore. In practice, it often just means charging larger clients more without any real connection to the additional value you’re actually delivering. That felt wrong to me.

I’d rather have pricing that’s honest and tied to the actual work. Similarly, I ignored a lot of standard agency-building advice, for example the “processize everything early” crowd, the “only hire junior staff to keep costs down” camp. Here, I believe my instinct was right. Dogma dressed up as best practice is still dogma.

You have to question what advice actually fits your agency, your values, and your model, rather than adopting it because it’s what everyone says you should do.

What’s a mistake that new agencies tend to repeat?

I have several for this one!

Doing great work and assuming it’ll speak for itself. You can do excellent SEO and still lose a client because they don’t understand what changed or why it matters to their business. That connection – between the work and the outcome – doesn’t make itself. You have to build it deliberately, every time.

Niching down, especially too early. Common advice suggests that picking a niche is profitable. I won’t argue that it won’t, as I’ve seen it work incredibly well. But that reward comes with significant risk, too, and no one seems to talk about that. What happened to the SEO agencies targeting tourism and hospitality, or arts & entertainment, when covid hit? What was once targeted and profitable suddenly became a huge liability.

Not building in room for error. Entrepreneurship isn’t: “try something, fail, and stop”. It’s more like “try something, fail, try again, fail, try something else, and… maybe something will work out?” If you assume you will fail – in large and small ways – and you plan for ways & time to handle that failure, you increase your chance of success. For example: you will underquote a project, and then have to deal with the consequences. You will also over-quote a project, and miss out on that business. It’s inevitable. If you don’t plan to learn from these errors, you won’t survive them.

Looking back, what would you tell your agency at year one?

Honestly? I didn’t set out to build an agency. I fell into it. After years in-house at startups, I was freelancing and looking for what came next, and 1.5 years in I realized I was already doing it. So year one me was winging it more than I’d like to admit.

What I’d say now: be more intentional about who you work with, earlier. That goes for clients and for collaborators. These relationships matter more than almost any tactical decision you’ll make.

Related: doing good work for good people isn’t just a nice sentiment. It’s a strategy, and smart business. It’s how you get referrals, how you retain clients, and how you build a team you actually want to work with.

Final Thoughts

Tory didn’t set out to build an agency and doesn’t run one by the book – and that’s precisely what makes her perspective worth reading. Whether it’s scrapping value-based pricing, having the hard conversation about unimplemented work, or planning for failure as a matter of course, the throughline is the same: question the defaults, stay honest, and build something you can actually stand behind.

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If you’re an agency, designer, or startup looking to boost your visibility, you can join Norobots and become part of our curated network of trusted businesses. If you’re a brand or client searching for the right partner, our platform helps you discover agencies, designers, and startups you can rely on. Browse the listings and find the right fit for your next project!

We’ve covered decision-making in agency project management before – in our first piece on the topic, two agency leaders shared how they navigate project pivots and high-stakes calls. The responses were pointed enough that we decided to keep asking. This time, we brought the same questions to two very different teams: Brut Marketing, a boutique strategy and marketing agency operating between Bali and LA, and Superbase, an independent brand design and strategy firm based in Boise, Idaho.

Same questions. Different contexts. Genuinely different answers.

When Rebuilding Is The Smarter Move

Not every project can be salvaged by iteration. Sometimes the most efficient path forward is back to zero – and recognizing that early is its own skill.

Have you ever had to rebuild or redo a project from scratch? What led to that situation?

Dian Andrusary, Partner at Brut Marketing:

Yes – more than once. Usually, it happens when a project moves into design or promotion too quickly, before the foundation is really defined. A brand may already have a logo, a website, or some market activity, but the positioning is still blurry, the audience is too broad, or the product story is not sharp enough. In those cases, trying to “fix” things layer by layer often wastes more time than starting over with strategy and building properly from there.

Changing Course Mid-Project – and Knowing When It’s Necessary

Stopping a project mid-process is a harder call than it sounds. The work is already underway, time and money are in, and changing direction means admitting the original path wasn’t right.

Have you ever stopped a project mid-process because you believed the direction was wrong?

Dian: Yes – especially in product or service launches where the first goal is not to scale immediately, but to test viability. In those cases, we often go to market with an MVP version, a focused offer, and a set of working hypotheses around audience, positioning, and value proposition. Sometimes the market response shows that the initial assumption is simply not strong enough. When that happens, we would rather pause, step back, and rethink the core proposition than keep pushing a direction that is not being validated. For us, that is not failure – it is part of a strategic process.

Kelly Williams, Founder and Creative Director of Superbase:

Mid-project pivots aren’t uncommon, and can happen in varying degrees and for various reasons. For example, we’ve had projects that required drastic changes in the direction due to client name changes, trademark issues, or leadership changes on the client side. Of course, those are all external factors. As far as changing directions during a project because of some sort of evolution with the creative internally – yes, this has happened too. If, throughout the course of the project, we notice that something isn’t working or we receive new information that impacts the direction, we must adapt to this. Although it’s very rare, this can certainly happen, and we’re not too stubborn to admit if something isn’t working. We want to be proud of the work. So, if it becomes clear that we would not be proud of the work, we pause, re-evaluate, and adjust.

The Decisions That Shape Everything Else

Every project involves dozens of small calls, but a few carry disproportionate consequences – the ones that set the direction everything else follows.

What type of decision in your work carries the most responsibility or risk?

Dian: The most high-stakes decisions are always the early strategic ones: positioning, audience prioritisation, offer logic, and go-to-market direction. A visual mistake can usually be corrected. But a wrong strategic decision affects everything that comes after it – website structure, messaging, content, campaign mechanics, media budget, and ultimately how the market understands the brand. That is why we treat early-stage thinking with the same seriousness as final execution.

Kelly: I believe that our branding work requires the most planning, research, and insight. It can be a risky endeavor to start a new brand or undergo a rebrand. There can be a lot of resources invested into it. So, we try to help our clients understand that it is worthwhile to take the time necessary to do it right. Much of the responsibility is in the form of expectation management, and being able to navigate subjective topics in order to keep the work moving forward.

Owning Mistakes: How Agencies Handle Accountability

Things go wrong in every long-term client relationship. What distinguishes good agencies isn’t a perfect track record – it’s how they respond when something breaks.

How do you handle responsibility when a decision made by your team causes problems for the client?

Dian: First, we take responsibility quickly and directly. No hiding behind the process, no trying to soften the issue. Then we break the situation down very clearly: what happened, what impact it created, what can be fixed immediately, and what needs to change internally so it does not happen again. In our experience, clients can forgive mistakes much faster than they can forgive defensiveness or a vague response.

Kelly: As the founder and director of the studio, the responsibility always ultimately falls on my shoulders. So even if my team or a member of my team makes a call that causes a problem for the client, the client doesn’t view that as a one-on-one issue. It’s something that affects the entire business. I try to always stand by my teams’ decisions and support them, but if there is clearly a bad judgement call, Superbase owns up to it, and we adjust internally. If there is good chemistry with the client, we all understand that we are working together toward a common goal. Problems aren’t usually the result of only one decision. There is almost always a pattern or some underlying issues that can be discovered and resolved in order to avoid an impasse.

The Strangest Brief They’ve Ever Worked Around

Agency project management rarely stays within the lines of the original brief. Occasionally it goes somewhere nobody planned for.

What was the strangest or most unusual requirement you had to design or build around?

Dian: One of the more unusual challenges was working on a tennis platform that had to serve very different needs inside one ecosystem. It was not just about making a nice interface – the product had to combine booking, CRM functionality, web and app experiences, and features for both players and tennis businesses. The real challenge was making something quite complex feel intuitive and coherent for very different users. Projects like that force you to think beyond pages or screens and design around an entire system.

Kelly: This isn’t necessarily a design requirement, but as far as strange moments in my career – one that comes to mind was self-inflicted, actually. Working as the Creative Director for a footwear company at the time, I had this idea for a product photoshoot that would require some snakes slithering around the product. A reptile rental business in Southern California turned out to be the solution. The budget didn’t stretch to the optional snake handler, so I signed a waiver and opted to handle them myself. Snakes aren’t really my thing – but people in Hollywood do this kind of stuff all the time, so how hard could it be? Picking up a bunch of snakes and trying to bring out the supermodel in them was a pretty new experience, to say the least. They crawled all over me, but the project got done with no bites. Honestly, I’m convinced the snakes shared my sense of humor about the whole thing.

Final Thoughts

What stands out across both conversations is that strong agency leadership is rarely about always getting it right the first time. It’s about knowing when to pause, when to rebuild, when to defend a direction, and when to admit it no longer works. Whether it’s a boutique strategy team or an independent design studio, the common thread is a willingness to stay flexible without losing conviction. The best decisions in agency project management often happen long before launch day – in the uncomfortable moments where teams choose clarity over momentum, honesty over ego, and long-term outcomes over short-term convenience.

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If you’re an agency, designer, or startup looking to boost your visibility, you can join Norobots and become part of our curated network of trusted businesses. If you’re a brand or client searching for the right partner, our platform helps you discover agencies, designers, and startups you can rely on. Browse the listings and find the right fit for your next project!