What is the development process of a digital product like?

Let’s say you come up with a brilliant idea for a digital product– you can explain it, you validated that there’s a need for it, you researched your target audience- So what’s next?

Next comes the actual development. To create a digital product, there are many things to take into consideration, like features, app development platform, design, and so on. This requires a multidisciplinary team that is capable of tackling the entire process. That’s why it might be better for a product studio to help with this.

If you outsource app development and partner with an agency like Hattrick we take your idea from napkin sketch to fully functioning application. Following our curated development process, we will guide you through each step towards a successful product launch. If you’re contemplating building a digital product, let’s explore our comprehensive guide on the software development process we follow at Hattrick.

Discovery

First we work to fully understand your overall vision and the purpose of your product. Together we explore the key concept and define the outline of what we’ll build. This phase is all about big picture thinking.

Before you can build a product, you need to understand its context for existence. Product definition sets the stage for the success of a product. Here we ask questions to understand the problem such as:

                                Why are we building this product?
                                 What problem does it solve?
                                 Who is going to use it?
                                 What are the goals of this product?

As a result of our vast experience we ask strategic questions to help you shape your idea into the right product for your market. It’s not just about creating a product, it’s about creating the right product. Once the product idea is defined, we do product research. The product research phase is probably the most variable between projects — the phase varies based on the complexity of the product, timing, available resources and many other factors. This phase can include individual in-depth interviews and/or competitive research. It starts with a good understanding of the users. Not only who the users are, but diving deeper into their needs, fears, motivations, and behavior. A comprehensive analysis of competitor products maps out their existing features in a comparable way. Research helps us understand industry standards and identify opportunities for the product.

Design

Design goes beyond how your product looks, it’s also about how it works. Here we shape the optimal user experience (UX) as well as hone the visual design (UI) details of your product. UX is vital for successful products. It aims to fulfill the user’s needs and create a better customer satisfaction conversion retention journey.

We draw insights that will be useful to determine not only what users want but why. Here is where we usually create user personas, or fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a product in a similar way. Creating experience maps (a visual representation that illustrates user flow within a product) is also helpful to understand the product from the users’ point of view.

After determining user expectations for the product we move on to the actual design phase and work collaboratively with all team players involved in the development of the product. This involves sketching our ideas and later creating the wireframes, which are the backbone of the product. Afterwards we move on to the prototype to map out the actual interaction experience of the product, it’s essentially a simulation. Lastly we create the design specs describing the processes and graphical assets needed to make the product work.

Once the discovery and design phases are completed we have a better understanding of the big picture. We can estimate development time and costs and create a clear product roadmap.

Development

After the approval of the Product Roadmap and estimation of time and cost for what’ll be required to build the product, we’re ready to kick-off development. Everything gets broken down into sprints where we plan to attack whatever items have the highest priority at any given time.

We use agile and SCRUM methodologies for project management. We provide several tools so clients have insight of the project’s process and the possibility to directly and in real-time validate decisions or propose changes. We ask the client to select a Product Owner who understands the product vision. Someone who can make decisions and be available to the team.

With agile methodologies, QA testing is part of the design and development processes, rather than being a separate phase. Within each sprint our QA engineers test and retest the product with each new added feature. This allows us to validate that the new features were implemented as expected and be able to catch any problems that may have been introduced. This translates to the preservation of time and budget.

During the development phase our software engineers also create and run automated unit tests to ensure that each individual piece of code does what they intend it to do. Our code is peer reviewed for finding defects, better solutions and overall achieving better code quality. To find the ideal tech partner you should have a mobile app rfp.

Launch

The launch is the deployment of the product, or making it available to its end users. When the product is ready to go live we accompany the client every step of the way. We take care of the launch of the product and make sure everything is running as smoothly as possible.

Scaling up

Launching your product is not the end of the journey, it's just the beginning.

To achieve product market-fit we need to innovate and iterate the product based on user feedback to make it the best it can be and be able to achieve exponential growth. Collecting user feedback is essential to validate the product and get an idea of potential features to add in future versions. The goal is to improve the product with each new iteration based on the evolving consumer demands and preferences.

                                                                                                    -Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky

Other working modalities

No matter what stage your product is at, we can jump in to give your team the boost it needs to build a successful product.

Apart from end to end product development we provide:

• Dedicated teams: Building a capable in-house product development team is hard and can take a lot of time. If you need to scale fast, we can put together a high-performing team that will work and feel as a part of your company.
  
• Staff Augmentation: Our highly-skilled engineers seamlessly integrate with your team, bringing all of our expertise to the table to ensure your project's success.
  
  

The process we follow falls in line with the Agile methodology. It is a type of development methodology that anticipates the need for flexibility and applies a level of pragmatism to the delivery of the finished product. It facilitates a collaborative culture. It values: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan. Based on our experience this has been the most useful method in order to produce products that have a real impact.

Do you have a digital product you’d like to collaborate on? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us!