Product Development Process
INNOVATING TOGETHER
We love partnering with our customers. From idea to execution, the process allows for an early understanding, and an iterative design and development cycle which reduces risks and increases quality. We see a better world driven by human technology – let’s innovate together.
Explore the Process
Discovery
Discovery is all about the WHAT behind your product. It’s not uncommon to want to jump right in and start coding, but that can easily lead down the wrong path. We use user stories to build a map together that leads to your loveable product.
Plan & Strategy
Once we have the key objective of your product and have defined the user stories, we can then plan the project. We break the project down into an initial design phase and several development sprints to deliver a minimum loveable product within a requested time and budget frame.
Initial design
Initial design has four steps: We start with sketching to quickly communicate our ideas. Next, we create wireframes from the sketches. Third, we create an information architecture and finally, we build clickable, interactive prototypes.
Sprints & Backlog
Development consists of multiple time-boxed iterations that incorporate planning, coding and testing called sprints. The start of each project begins with a creation of the backlog. The backlog is just a list of what in total needs to be completed for the project divided into parts for each sprint. You want enough items to fit the time box and still be able to deliver something tangible at the end of the sprint. At the beginning of each sprint, the items in that sprint are distributed to the designers and developers based on the time they have in that sprint.
Design
During each sprint, we iterate on the design. This includes building the actual designed resources for the product such as graphics and buttons, but it also includes thinking about how user interface and user experience is working with the delivered and soon to be delivered features.
Development
The development team works through the assigned tasks to complete the features. The goal is to complete all the features assigned in a sprint. Since it is only two weeks – we usually hit the goal.
Quality Assurance
QA, as it is affectionately known, is where we put the code through our crack team of testers and they break it in all possible ways. As bugs are found, they are added into the backlog.
End of Sprint
At the end of each sprint we groom the backlog. New features and bugs found in testing are added, completed features are removed and the whole list is then prioritized. We also demo all delivered features to you so you can see the progress!
Deploy
Once the product is ready to ship, we package up all the code and move it into a staging area. We test it one more time end-to-end. Once ready, we move the final code and design into production. This can be pressing one button or a much longer process depending on how complex the product is.
Support
Any initial product design is at best an educated guess of what a user will love. Most products deliver only the basics in the first version (the minimum loveable product). Every product needs ongoing support to implement new features and fix any issues found by users.
Grow
We love to help products grow. In fact growth hacking has become one of our favorite activities. We can help you promote your product through social engineering and measuring what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes we have to change the marketing and sometimes we have to change the actual product.
