Product

10 things we've learned since becoming a digital product studio

May 26, 2021

As little as five years ago, businesses that designed websites and created digital solutions were all termed 'digital agencies'. They were categorised as a web build business or a digital design agency, but that all changed when a new approach came to the fore‚ product thinking and product development.

Code as a business made the shift to become a digital product studio and adopt a product thinking approach back in 2016, and this has led the way we plan and deliver products for our partners ever since.

To mark World Product Day and the craft of product management, here are 10 things we've learned during our journey as a product studio and some of the essentials you'll need to make the approach work for your teams.

1. It's more than a mindset

Product Thinking involves prioritising work that will make the biggest commercial impact, constantly looking for ways to make brilliant products even better. To achieve this it needs more than a 'mindset' or you will go back to old ways.

It requires coaching and top-down buy in to ensure everyone is aligned to clearly defined goals within the organisation.

2. Data sits at the heart of a product approach

Three pillars of product thinking are 'Do the right thing'; Do it the right way; Do it together. It is not always easy to do the right thing. The business' may not like what the data says but it does not lie!

Data-driven decision making sits at the heart of a product approach.

3. Pace is your friend

The approach is about prioritising the work that will make the biggest commercial impact and measuring impact. Get your new feature or content to customers quickly and you will know what users feel about it 'in the wild', which can sometimes differ from testing environments.

Prioritising speed gets a bad rep by product people but often getting something out is better than it being perfect in order to learn and iterate.

Be brave. Experiment often.

4. You need a progressive Financial Director

A business taking a product approach needs to understand that you can't always cost for everything.

5. The importance of a strong team

Creating a team with good skills and who understand the process is essential. It's also about removing the silos of an organisation for speed and effectiveness and aligning the entire culture towards shared goals and metrics, with autonomy in teams to find the best way forward.

By fostering this non-siloed culture based around clearly defined goals in their organisation, businesses can stay agile and more immediately correlate investment with commercial return.

6. Always learn

With a product approach, the work is not done until it generates a return ‚ and it often won't be right the first time.

Enjoy successes AND failures.

7. Research, research, research

Money spent in the research and insights stage, to understand why, pays dividends in the outcome.

8. Augmenting is the new in-housing

Building internal product capability is becoming more commonplace but this is increasingly being augmented with product expertise from businesses like Code.

This enables companies to retain the product knowledge but not have to find all the specialists needed to make product thinking work.

9. The death of the Hippo?

We have been able to turn briefs from we want these things‚ to we want this outcome‚ after spending time with client leaders and educating them around the why.

This level of senior-level agility is new, as previously management teams tend to have a fixed mindset about the things they want, so this level of openness to change is new.

10. Stop if you must

Don't be afraid to stop if it's not going well. Sometimes product ideas come from a well-informed place, but sometimes the customer and the market are hard to read. To keep going in the wrong direction is not cool (even if the CEO thinks it is).

In summary, the word 'product' can be divisive. We have actually also found that removing the word 'product' from the conversation, ironically, has made the principles more understandable and interesting to a still-maturing decision-maker and market. 

Instead, we talk about the virtues of product, namely people working well together to imagine the right things to create amazing outcomes and doing it in the right way using modern engineering methods.

Once you show this working, everyone can buy into it really easily.

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For more insights into product development and product thinking, click here. You can also follow us on Twitter @Computerlovers and join in on the conversation with #WorldProductDay.

Need help with your vision or product strategy? We'd love to hear from you.

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