Creating a competitive product is hard work. The process is not linear and involves a lot of interconnected moving parts. If you miss, or worse, skip even one of them, sooner or later, it will backfire. To top it off, things become much harder when you don’t have an in-house team, have to hire different service providers and manage their work.

And now, imagine that you find a company that guides you from product idea validation to its full implementation and further support. Like a digital orchestra with all the instruments necessary to make a great idea resonate, spread, and flourish. This is what a digital product agency does.

In this blog post, you will learn what a digital product agency is and how it can make your product thrive.

Key elements of the product development strategy

One of the most important components of a successful product is an elaborate strategy that covers all the steps you have to take to bring your product to market. A professional digital product agency knows all the ins and outs of creating a strategy like this and will lead you through the product development process.

The product development strategy includes six stages:

1. Idea evaluation and market research. It was Eric Ries who said, “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.” And market research is one way to find this out. The market research stage includes gathering information about your target audience’s needs to prove a demand for your product and competitor analysis to find the existing solutions and market gap.
2. Concept development and testing. This stage helps you test your idea, prove its viability and identify if the problem you’re trying to solve does exist.
3. Business analysis and product strategy. After you’ve validated your idea, it’s time to define your go-to-market plan, analyze and plan expenses and allude resources.
4. Product design and engineering. This stage includes prototyping, creation of tech specifications and MVP development.
5. Testing. This stage includes testing the product on the market, gathering statistics, and evaluating KPIs. Based on the results, you can optimize and improve the product.
6. Post-launch strategy. Finish up with consistent analysis and optimization of your existing product. This is when you gather metrics and define your future direction and growth.

No to put too much pressure on you, but if you don’t pay enough attention to each of these stages, you risk creating a product your audience doesn’t need. So, you can either work on your product strategy alone, or you can partner up with a digital product agency that will do all of this for you.

What is a digital product agency 

A digital product agency helps you create a product from idea validation to its full implementation, testing and further growth. Unlike web development companies, digital product agencies not only develop an actual product but fully participate in all business processes. 

Digital product agency services

A professional digital product agency offers a wide range of services for a successful product launch. Moreover, it can provide you with a dedicated team that works on your project exclusively and creates a customized strategy for your niche.

Here are the main services a digital product agency provides.

Product strategy development

A product strategy is a go-to-market plan that includes your positioning on the market, market segments you will serve, product features, marketing and distribution channels, pricing strategies and scaling opportunities.

A product strategy describes the main goals of your product and a step-by-step plan on how you can achieve your business objectives. 

This is what you get:

• A product positioning and marketing strategy
• A value proposition map
• Your main product goals
• Initiatives to achieve these goals

User research
The purpose of user research is to understand the emotions, goals, pains, behaviors and motivations of your customers. It’s done with the help of customer interviews, surveys, prototypes testing and field studies. User research helps you create a user-centered solution that speaks directly to your target audience and validate the idea of the product.

This is what you get:

• Target audience analysis
• Customer needs and wants analysis
• Customer journey map
• User scenarios

Design
Digital product agencies offer product design services tailored specifically to your customer needs.

This is what you get:

• Prototypes
• Mockups
• Wireframes
• UX/UI design
• Brand identity
• Art direction

Development 
During the development stage, a digital product agency chooses a tech stack according to your product business goals and technical specifications. After creating technical requirements and project architecture, the development process begins.

This is what you get:

• Project architecture 
• A document with technical requirements
• Software development
• Support and maintenance

Analytics and optimization
When you’ve pushed your product on the market, a digital product company tracks the analytics and gathers all the necessary metrics to optimize, improve and scale your business.

This is what you get:

• KPIs setting
• Analysis of the most important metrics of your project
• Product analytics tracking
• Product optimization strategy

Infrastructure
Infrastructure includes all the components for administering the development, deployment and management of the app. 

This is what you get:

• Design of the infrastructure that’s suitable for supporting features, capacity and demand of the product

Business consulting
Business consulting means continuous guidance on all business processes the company deals with before, during and after product development. 

It includes:

• Product management
• Business solutions research
• Marketing strategies
• Growth strategies
• Strategic planning
• Financial management
• HR management

How to choose a reliable digital product agency

Here are some tips on how to choose the product agency you can trust your product with.

• Pay attention to their portfolio

A diverse portfolio with experience in different industries proves that the company is not limited to a certain niche and can create solutions for different markets.

• Ask as much as possible about their work process

First of all, it’s a communication process. It should be fully transparent and the client should have unlimited access to all the documents, tasks and reports.

Specify details about their reporting process. It’s perfect when the company organizes regular meetings and rolls out releases. This way, the client can track the progress and offer changes.

• Get acquainted with their specialists

Ensure that the digital product agency has a sufficient amount of specialists in different areas. Don’t hesitate to look through their portfolio, study their experience and achievements.

•  Ask about their pricing model and methodology

It’s better to choose a company that practices iterative product development. It is the process of generating creative ideas, building prototypes and testing them to prove their viability. And then starting all over again. It gives a client full control over the process and shortens the delivery time.

Our cases of digital product strategy development

To give you an example of how digital product agency works, we want to share our experience in creating a business and development strategy for Utex, a digital platform for the textile and apparel industries.

Scope of work
Our task was to analyze the Ukrainian market of textile and apparel. During the market research, we’ve found that the market lacks standardisation and a verified database of service providers. So, we helped our client analyze, develop, test, and launch the first global marketplace for the textile industry.

Here is what our client received:

• Idea validation
• Market research
• Naming
• Product strategy
• Product infrastructure
• Website development
• Product launch and promotion
• Analytics and optimization

As you can see, a digital product agency delves into the business goals of the product and creates a digital strategy accordingly. It’s your reliable partner that will stand by your side during the entire product lifecycle.

Conclusion

Working with a digital product company is an investment in your product success. You get a dedicated team of professionals who cover all the steps in your startup journey and help it become an established company. The result? A robust and competitive product, optimized for growth and exposure.

Do you want to learn more about what we can do for your product? Contact us to discuss how to get your business off the ground!