3 Things to Look for in a Digital Product Studio

When envisioning your new digital product, you want it to escape the ordinary and deliver the kind of value that makes your customer relationships stick. In your head, you can literally see the product in use and how it solves your customer pains in surprising, creative, and practical ways. But, even if you have the greatest idea, you need to have the right team in place to engineer your dream into reality. Just like your business, your digital product must be built to scale and adapt.

This is a great first step. Now you need to find product minded people to fill in a few roles: product lead, design, engineering, marketing, and support and keep them motivated and engaged. You also need to ensure they are the best in their field and that they can recruit others. Usually, this comes without direct responsibility of ownership and budget availability. Hard stuff, we know.

This is where product studios step in. At SpiceFactory, we train everyone in the organization to focus on the final outcome, understand the budget constraints, and have processes in place to deliver the desired outcomes in the most effective way. As our product teams work across different industries there is a deep understanding of many verticals and the right people can be allocated to execute on the right problem.

Should you work with a digital product studio?

Digital product studios usually have diverse experience in delivering products that capture and refine business value for their clients, regardless if they are early stage startups or established companies.

With a team of product managers, designers, strategists, marketers, and engineers, they’re well equipped to solve complex business problems creatively while anticipating and preventing any problems that may arise and derail deadlines and the budget. (We wrote extensively about the difference between product studios and your typical software development companies here.)

So, what should a product studio offer to your business and how do you know that they’ll deliver a product that will wow your customers? Besides making sure their reputation is flawless you also need to ensure that they have people and processes in place to guide your product from strategy to implementation.

Let’s look at the key product building pillars your technology partner needs to rely on to deliver the kind of digital product that you can confidently take to market.

1. Sharp minds to refine your product strategy

The right partner knows that, without a solid digital product strategy, your business will have a hard time delivering significant value in the digital economy. Realizing growth opportunities with a new product may be powered by technology, but it starts with a solid understanding of your business needs, challenges and objectives, and how the new product will help strengthen your core business capabilities.

Working with a product studio you’ll develop actionable strategy that maps out the path forward to successful implementation of a new digital product, combining strategic guidance with technical know-how in order to:

Achieve product-market fit
Enable rapid development
Launch the product while minimizing risk
Sustain the growth of your product.

2. Focus on experience design as a key differentiator

Digital products are operating within a constantly increasing ecosystem of touchpoints and devices. This opens up new opportunities for delivering value, but it also puts pressure on companies to provide consistent and meaningful user experience.

A product studio needs to have strong expertise in UX design in order to create user experiences that will give your company a unique business advantage.

A product studio will help you achieve this through:

User and market research (User Personas, Experience Maps, Jobs-To-Be-Done, User Journey Map).
Rapid prototyping, ongoing usability testing (live user testing, remote usability testing, user surveys)
Iterative UX/UI design based on user feedback

At the conclusion of this iterative process, the product studio should deliver a final design for deployment.

3. Product-minded engineering practice

Engineering teams in product studios typically nurture a product mindset focusing on the value delivered to the client and prioritizing continual learning and improvement throughout the product life cycle.

They deliver digital products using Agile methodology, with rapid release cycles and functional features at the end of each iteration. This level of fast-paced development typically fits well with the mindset of companies that don’t want to be stuck in long decision making cycles and ‘analysis paralysis.’

A product studio will be able to deliver a profitable product that delivers maximum value to the end users through product validation at all stages of development and a strong focus on business priorities and ROI of the product they’re building.

Takeaways

A successful product doesn’t just impress stakeholders and users with a great first impression. It is built to scale with the business, evolving together with user and market needs.

Achieving this requires experts who know how to frame problems, spot opportunities, and continually support your product by experimenting with new features. The idea is to have a trusted partner that will help you on both technical and strategic sides so you can drive market value and make smart, profitable product decisions.