How Ice Hockey Is Helping Illustrate Digital In 2025

What does ice hockey have to do with digital agency structure?

Well, it’s more than just a metaphor to keep our bearded-ice-hockey-fanatic CEO engaged.

The systems and strategies used by ice hockey teams are perfect to help digital agencies deliver high quality, people-driven, frustration free digital experiences to their customers.

In 2025, we’re using insights from Cardiff Devils, St. Louis Blues, and insights from operational experts to help us restructure our agency to double down on what we do best.

How?

Well, let me start by telling you about table football. (I’ve not lost my mind, promise.)

The ‘Table Football’ Approach To Structure

We’ve all experienced silos at work.

When you start a company you’ll likely have individual contributors doing all of a function (say, one standalone content marketer) and those functions will eventually grow into teams (content marketing & seo) as you add new people.

Repeat that across different functions and you get silos.

I’d bet my hat that, if you’re a leader in your company, you’ve had a meeting in the last 18 months about how to combat silos and poor communication across teams.

In lots of organisations these silos are necessary because it doesn’t make sense to mix these functions. They need to learn together, grow together, and deliver together. You might get your Security team to consult on your development approach, but it’s not essential that they’re together every day.

That means you often end up with something that looks like a table football table. All of your people are lined up, in the area that makes sense for them on the field, and they can all be doing their job.

However…

For digital agencies, this table football approach can be detrimental to delivering projects.

Agencies will often start life by building out their teams around functions – like Front End or Back End Development – so each stage of the creation process is covered.  A little like building a house, you need the previous person to complete their portion of the digital experience, before the next person starts theirs.

This is really useful when you’re small and agile. You might end up with too much work on one person, because a project is particularly heavy on that function, but the chain of passing a website from one person to another works well.

The problems come with growth. When an agency adds new people – which is exactly what we did here at Illustrate Digital – you end up with silos like this:

Worse still, the people-driven chain becomes a team-driven chain, where it’s much less clear who is doing what at each stage of the creation process. Ownership and understanding of the load on a team goes out of the window.

Basically, you’re taking a website, and trying to pass it through the rungs of a table football table, electing whoever is available, and hoping a site comes out.

That might not look that bad in the  isolation of a project planning phase, which is why it often goes unnoticed.

But, when you consider that an agency often has a number of projects running at the same time, and sickness, holidays, and project complications happen, it really looks like this:

Chaos incarnate.

This was our own experience at Illustrate Digital until very recently. Even though our customers were always happy with the work we delivered, it was a hard-fought process internally to get it there. And, not without hiccups along the way.

So, things needed to change. And the way you change this is with ice hockey.

The Ice Hockey Approach To Efficiency

‘Ice hockey is a game of math and efficiency.’

That’s a direct quote from British ice hockey legend, Matthew Myers, from his Q&A at our Christmas event in 2024.

You don’t need to know much about ice hockey to understand where he’s coming from. Simply put, each ice hockey team is made up of sub-teams – known as ‘lines’ – that play together consistently over time.

The lines eat, train, and play together all of the time (barring injury) and spend as much time together as possible.  They’re paired based on their skillset, and what the objective is out on the ice.

Here’s a current example of how that looks from the St. Louis Blues.

Don’t worry if that table is gibberish to you, or you don’t know who they are. I don’t either, if I’m really being honest. All you need to know is:

• Lines are made up of different functions
• Lines play together consistently
• Lines are used based on the team’s needs

When I asked Matthew Myers why playing together so frequently is important, his response was eye opening.

‘If I’m playing with a left handed forward, I instinctively know where to place the puck in relation to his body. If he likes to make a specific move, I know how to position my body to set him up for success.’

These outcomes are only possible because a line plays together consistently over time. Rather than randomly throwing people at the ice, hoping that a game-winning constellation appears, lines are built intentionally in a way that builds connection and develops a winning playing style.

And, often the best lines aren’t made up of star players. It’s the people who are agile, adaptable, and own their role within the team.

This is exactly the kind of consistency that a digital agency needs to be successful.

Deconstructing The Foosball Table

If the table football approach is made up of silos, ice hockey is made up of ‘lean teams’.

These teams work together, consistently, to deliver outcomes. They’ve built a rapport (or ‘playing style’) that is complimentary and plays to each person’s strengths.

In order to swap from one approach to the other, we need to deconstruct the digital agency foosball table and turn it into a lean team. (Funnily enough, this is close to how most early-stage agencies run!)

We’ve done this by taking each function and pairing them together into teams. Each team now has one person of each ability in their team:

Each team has come up with its own name, roles and responsibilities, and approach to completing projects. All of which align with the needs of our customers.

The graphic above is somewhat oversimplified. But, that says more about my graphic design skills than how this works.

This approach allows us to:

• Increase effective communication between people
• Reduce variation in processes (eg. switching developers)
• Create clear areas of process ownership (eg. designer -> developer handoff)
• Streamline the path to complete a project

Better still, people will get to know each other, and much like Matthew Myers, they’ll know where to put the puck to set their teammates up for success.

Wrapping This Up…

This restructure is an exciting time in Illustrate Digital’s development, and how we want to deliver open and transparent value to our customers.

In future blog posts I’ll introduce you to the new teams and the people in them, as well as talk more about how we’re measuring the success of this change for our customers.

And, if you’re interested in working with us, why not check out one of our case studies to see if we’d be a good fit?

Written by James Johnson

Operations Director

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James is our Operations Director and resident ‘Banter King’. He’s a northern boy with a decade of experience in B2B Marketing and SaaS.

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