Every company’s situation is a little different. After working with dozens of founders and their teams, we’ve seen what it takes to make custom development projects successful.

1. Business Goals Alignment
Making sure that development efforts align with business goals is critical for success. We start every project by making sure we understand what is driving the need for this project at this time. This gives all parties a shared picture of how each project contributes to the success of the business.

2. Roles and Responsibilities
There are many facets to building digital products. Most of our clients have a vision (it’s why they are founders!) and they want to do the work of product management. This involves making decisions about what exactly the thing is and does. We typically take care of all the work of building, launching, and maintaining the product. Many clients like to be involved in testing. During this phase of the project, we’ll figure out what will work best for you!

3. User Study
For new projects, we like to create profiles or avatars of the users who will be served. This helps keep the focus on solving the users’ problems and bringing the user delight.

4. Design
Before writing code, it’s best to do a round of design. Not only will this make things look nice, but it will surface any missing pieces in the product definition. An ounce of design can save a pound of development.

5. MVP
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was any tech startup. Break down the vision into phases, and put together a Phase 1 spec that is achievable within a short time. We want to launch as soon as we possibly can. Skip building pieces of the system that can be done by hand.

6. Development
Once the This is where we start to bring the product to life. Once the MVP vision is set, we will sprint to get the code ready.

7. Test Early, Test Often
We’ll put a working version of the product in your hands as soon as we can ahead of the launch date. We’ll work with you to have many hands testing the product including our team, your team, and others.

8. Launch
The rule here is: launch as soon as you possibly can. The sooner you can get real users in the system and start getting their feedback, the quicker you will be able to start fine-tuning the product features. Do a soft launch prior to bigger marketing efforts.

9. Grow
Once the product is live, the game is on! You’ll be balancing the need to build more product features, fix things that are causing issues for users, and adapting the product based on feedback and usage patterns. We’ll help you measure user activity and plan for marketing and promotion.