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In a traditional consulting engagement, the shape of the work is defined early. A brief is agreed, deliverables are scoped, and the team works toward a clear endpoint. That structure has real value. But the most complex challenges rarely arrive with a clear shape. They shift as you get closer to them, reveal new layers as trust builds, and require someone who can hold that ambiguity without retreating to the safety of a fixed scope.
Hellon's embedded talent model is built around this exact premise. Our consultants become part of the team, sitting inside the organisation's daily rhythm, its standups, its tools and ways of working, while staying connected to Hellon's wider network of over 100 specialists across design, technology, data, and strategy. A brief might define the starting point, but what the team actually needs becomes clearer once someone is genuinely inside it, close enough to hold the complexity and move with it as it shifts. Being inside is what makes the difference. The problems become shared problems, the progress becomes shared progress, and the trust that builds from working alongside someone, rather than reporting to them, is what makes the work land differently.
Two of our consultants in London have spent extended periods working in exactly that way. Different industries, different team structures and different challenges. What they share is a perspective you can only get from the inside.
Nataly Perez, Lead Designer, Hellon
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Nataly spent three months working inside a newly formed customer experience team at a major UK energy provider. The team had been assembled to operate as journey managers but were coming from different professional backgrounds and didn't yet have the shared tools, language, or confidence to do it. Her brief was open by design, and that openness turned out to be the point.
She started by listening. Before any curriculum was built, she ran a maturity assessment with the team, mapping where each person was, what they needed in their roles, and where the gaps were. From that, she shaped a two-day-a-week programme: one day knowledge-led, drawing on Hellon's design thinking materials adapted for this team's context; the second a practical exchange, where the team applied what they'd learned to live challenges and pushed back with questions.
What emerged went beyond the original scope. Being inside the team meant Nataly could identify what a formal brief would never have captured, confidence gaps, communication friction, a group of individuals still finding their footing, and the programme shifted to meet it.
The outcome was measurable in two ways: the team left with stronger capabilities, and a clearer sense of themselves as a unit. Through the process of learning together and working through live problems as a group, a collection of individuals who hadn't yet found their collective identity became, by the end, a functioning team.
Chanel Jones, Senior Service Designer, Hellon
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Chanel's engagement was nearly a year, embedded inside a large public infrastructure programme. She was initially brought in to fill a specific experience design gap, ensuring that customer insight stayed at the centre of work packages as they moved toward delivery. It was meant to last a couple of months, but the programme was extended to reflect the strength of Chanel’s contribution.
That extension wasn't incidental. It reflected something the embedded model makes possible that traditional engagements rarely do: the ability to see what's actually needed and adapt to meet it, rather than staying within the boundaries of what was originally scoped.
Her role shifted as the programme's needs shifted. She took on customer experience representation across two regions, stepping in where the customer perspective was at risk of being lost as work packages moved forward. She engaged with multiple work streams, understanding what each was working on and identifying where design expertise could help move things forward. Where research had previously ended at the report stage, she pushed it further, building ways for the team to keep interrogating findings long after the formal work was done.
What she describes most clearly is something organisations rarely think to ask for: the diagnostic value of being inside. Not just identifying that a gap exists, but understanding what kind of gap it actually is, whether it is structural, temporary, or worth investing in permanently.
That diagnostic clarity is only possible because of proximity. A consultant working on a fixed brief sees what they are pointed at. Someone inside the team sees the whole picture, including the things nobody thought to mention in the original scope.
Being inside also meant being able to bring Hellon's broader perspective into a team that had been thinking primarily within the boundaries of one industry. Working across telecoms, automotive, finance, transportation, and healthcare means understanding how customers actually think, and they don't compare like with like.
The knowledge transfer ran in both directions. By the end of the engagement, Chanel had developed a genuine understanding of how a complex, heavily regulated industry operates from the inside. The constraints, the competing priorities, the pace of change and the reasons behind it. That understanding now travels with her into future work, expanding what she can bring to the next team she joins.
What the engagement leaves behind
Both Nataly and Chanel left the team stronger, in capability, in confidence, and in ways that no statement of work could have specified in advance. That is what the embedded model makes possible. Not just delivering what was agreed, but seeing what is actually needed and being close enough to act on it. The value isn't only in what gets done during the engagement. It's in what stays when it ends.
Read more about the model here.
Interested in how Embedded Talent could work for your organisation?
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