Liz Flyntz
Founder & Partner
Liz Flyntz has spent fifteen years on both sides of the agency relationship. As Director of UX and Design at DOOR3, she led teams across a wide range of engagements—startups, SaaS products, e-commerce, security, healthcare, higher education—learning how agencies pitch, how they structure work, and how they perform under pressure when projects get complicated. Before that, and after it, she worked inside institutions of higher education as a buyer: scoping projects, managing vendors, navigating procurement from the inside.
That double vantage point is what she brings to Launch Day. She has been evaluated. She has done the evaluating. She knows what gets obscured in both directions, and what the selection process consistently fails to surface. She teaches design and media art at Johns Hopkins University.
I've Been the Agency. I've Been the Client.
The first time I sat across a conference table evaluating a design agency, I knew exactly what they were doing. I'd done it myself. The pitch is its own genre, with its own conventions. The problem is that buyers often don't know that, and the process is largely designed by the people who do.
The evaluation process selects for the wrong things. Most buyers don't share a budget in their RFP, which triggers a race to the bottom. Without a number to build toward, agencies guess. They propose what they think will win, not what the work actually costs, because the final decision often lands with someone who has one legible metric: the bottom line. Meanwhile, agencies absorb weeks of senior staff time responding to RFPs they'll probably lose, pulled away from the actual work of building things. Good agencies are optimized for delivery, not selection theater. The system is bad for everyone, and the waste is almost entirely invisible to buyers.
For design engagements especially, the criteria buyers default to—portfolios—are nearly useless as predictive tools. A compelling portfolio tells you an agency has done good work somewhere, under some conditions. It tells you nothing about how they handle scope change, or whether they've worked inside an organization with a six-month approval cycle. I learned to read those signs from both directions: from inside the room where the pitch was being made, and from inside the institution managing the aftermath. The warning signs are usually present early. They become visible if you know what to look for. That's what Launch Day is built on.