Win the work

Agency 29 Founder + CEO Maureen Ballatori started her agency with a dream of sitting behind a computer and pushing pixels all day. Nearly 20 years after she started freelancing and ten years after taking the agency full-time, she's sharing the wins, losses and hard-earned lessons behind building a 10-person agency. Maureen will talk about finding a profitable niche and prioritizing sales, firing bad-fit clients, navigating hiring, and learning what sustainable growth actually requires.

Clients are beginning to ask design teams what they’re doing about AI, and most agencies probably don’t have a real answer. This talk gives you one: how design systems are becoming the product you pitch, what to document so it reads as infrastructure instead of overhead, and an audit you can run in a first client meeting to find gaps and scope new work. If you’re job hunting, hiring, or running an agency trying to win the next contract, this is the skill set that will separate who gets the work from who doesn’t.

Before you ever say hello, I've already read your posts, checked your mutual connections, and formed an opinion. Hiring pretends to be objective — but it runs on the same instincts as a first date: gut reactions, curated profiles, and a little light stalking. I'll share the real stories behind what actually shapes a hiring decision, and why we should be more honest about it.

A solid portfolio gets you considered — not hired. A brand-side creative director breaks down what signals actually earn trust and get creatives hired.

Every agency has a creative graveyard. It’s full of brilliant ideas, terrible ideas, impossible client requests, abandoned prototypes, and “this changes everything” moments that didn’t. Through twenty years of creative work and constant technological change, we’ll explore why the best creative careers aren’t built by predicting what’s next, they’re built by staying curious, adapting, and continuing to make things anyway.

Hybrid’s 650-page monograph was never just self-promotion. It was built from the start as proof of a premise: that genuine curiosity, asking the right questions, and bringing a fresh perspective are what win the work. This session covers how that conviction plays out in the room, and why how you talk about your practice is inseparable from how you succeed.