Businesses of all sizes have been facing unique challenges as a result of COVID-19, and at Thorgate we understood that we need to step up in the right direction. Many businesses rely on developing their digital product to deliver value to their customers.
We’ve put together a list of 6 reasons why you should take our one-hour product consultation session, even if you don’t work with us in the long run.
1. No strings attached
To make it clear, the idea of the session is to help you kickstart your development process, answer some of the questions you might have beforehand and give you valuable insights driven by data on how to make your whole product development process efficient. All this obviously comes with no strings attached. The session is free of charge, and we leave it up to you to decide if you would like to come back to us for an analysis workshop, a more detailed consultation later, or even some development work. However, this one hour is just to equip you with all the information you need to make some key decisions on how to develop your product.
The session is great for non-technical founders looking for expert advice on the technology, bootstrapped startups looking to cut development costs and be lean, or potential partners interested in learning more about how we make product development better at Thorgate. You can easily book the session here.
2. Make your requirements lean
The value of making your requirements lean can not be overstated. In this one-hour session, you may expect us to synthesize 1-2 clearly defined outcomes with your business speciality in mind. Whatever you choose to focus on with this one-hour consultation, you can expect that we will also help you make your requirements lean by the end of it.
Our aim is to help you structure your needs and prioritise your product requirements. We would like to challenge you positively to create the most lean product requirements that can speed up your time-to-market as well as make you cost-efficient. Building too much without validation or clear learning objectives is the biggest inefficiency. As one of our senior product consultants, Janar Merilo, says, “To test the product and market, a product is built with just enough features to satisfy early users and to provide feedback for future product development”. Read his blog on the topic here.
3. Build a story map
One key output that you could choose to focus on is building a story map. This would be a thorough walk through the product’s scope, which could include a visual representation if necessary.
All the things that you want your users to do within your software could end up being bottlenecks when it comes to product release. The solution is mapping user stories.
User story mapping is a simple, collaborative exercise that helps you define your user’s journey within your product and determine where gaps could exist. It is a great way to keep your user’s needs and actual use cases front and centre when planning your development strategy. However, doing this on your own can be slightly overwhelming with a one-directional approach.
Booking yourself the one-hour free product consultation would allow you to include product experts in your industry from Thorgate, show you the big picture and work with you to map your user story, something that would help your developers use them as real workflows instead of traditional (and inefficient) backlogs.
4. Create user personas
This is something you might think you have figured out already. Chances are that you already asked yourself a few times who you are creating your product for. However, a discussion with a consultant at Thorgate could help you answer deeper and more relevant questions in this direction to optimize your entire development process.
Before you write a single line of code, before you even begin to write your product requirements, you must ask yourself:
- Who is this product for? Who are my product users?
- Are all those users necessary in the first phase? Maybe I can leave out some parties for the first phase?
- What do those product users want the most? What are the 20% of the functionalities that give 80% of the results? (Pareto’s 80/20 principle, something we swear by at Thorgate)
If you’re still in the product ideation phase or the initial stages of development, we can help you create user personas that define your end-users challenges and pains. We can use the data we have gathered over 8+ years of product development in a diverse set of industries to help you answer these questions, define user personas, and apply Pareto’s principle to your functionalities. You can book a session here.
5. Determine a phased-release plan
Product release is not a one-time thing. All digital products must be released in phases suitable to help product owners make key decisions based on feedback received after each release.
As an experienced product company, we’ve built 150+ complex products and understand realistic timelines and phased approaches to releasing a product of any scale.
You could choose to get help from us to build you a cost-efficient and optimal release plan with realistic goals regarding what you could bring to the market with each phase. We could also help you pivot your product if you’ve already gone through some of your phased-release plans and need a pivot due to the ongoing crisis or any unexpected feedback. All you need to do is book a session here.
6. Get time cost estimates
If this is the first time you’re about to develop a product from scratch, you might find a diverse range of cost and time estimates if you just google “How much does product development cost?” or “How long does it take to create a digital product?” Let's be real: There are a lot of incomplete answers on the internet.
One of our biggest values is transparency, and since we are extremely transparent with our customers, we want to bring the same value into this consultation session. So if you choose to consult with a product development expert at Thorgate, you can be assured that they will equip you with the right information on
- Realistic time estimate to build your product in quality
- Realistic cost estimate that wouldn’t set you up for surprises
- Comparison of cost and time when outsourcing vs building your own product
- Comparison of cost and time when outsourcing to different regions of the world (India, UK, Poland, Estonia, US etc.)
If you choose this to be the focus of discussion for the one-hour product consultation, you can be assured that we will help you prepare in the best way possible on what to expect in terms of timing and pricing, depending on how you develop your product.
Conclusion
If you are bracing yourself for the exciting experience of building a digital product, you can take this one-hour free session to ensure you are headed in the right direction. Why not?
If you have already mapped the challenges in your organization, bring them along. If not, we can use that one hour to map the current situation and figure out the bottlenecks along the way. However, you do not need to bring all your ideas to the table when you come. By allowing thoughts and ideas to emerge organically in the session, you will be able to see what is needed and what is not.
Through this session, we are able to increase the accuracy of your estimates, accelerate your product delivery, and improve production success.
Request to book a session here.
We highly suggest that you focus on one key outcome for that one hour that is the most important to you. This would help us be the most productive. However, if you feel like you need basic knowledge of the entire process, we can generally touch upon everything that we could squeeze into our one-hour workshop.
Have more questions about this session? Write to us at hi@thorgate.eu
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