Creating a successful product is about more than building it right. You have to build the right thing. Then, people must want your product, so you need to resonate with real people. When your buyers become users, you must keep them invested with a brand they admire and a product that keeps adding value to their lives.
By considering not just the quality of a product’s overall user experience, we embrace a cross-disciplinary approach that considers a product’s users and buyers.
Our cross-disciplinary approach helps us see when a buyer becomes a user and what keeps them around. With this strategy, we consider how great product design, product management, product marketing and brand can reach the best possible outcomes.
Our Cross-Discipline Solution
Our entire team is working towards the same goal for our clients: a better product.
At its core, a better product is marketable, valuable and usable.
- Our product marketers and brand designers create marketable products. They prioritize the buyers of a product and consider what drives a person to purchase based on their individual needs and pains.
- Our product managers build valuable products. As a team focused on the users of a product, they do the foundational user research that drives our designers’ decisions about a product’s design. They help us say, is what we’re building going to benefit real people?
- Our product designers create usable products. Usability starts with understanding the value product managers have uncovered about the product. Designers then apply that foundation to the user experience.
Clients tell us what pains they’re experiencing. We use information from discovery to diagnose their problem as a buyer issue, a user issue or both. As the client learns more about product through our engagement, we find more opportunities to improve their product beyond the original ask. The product work creates a lasting impact on the business itself. Here’s how.
Why Our Cross-Discipline Solution Works
It advocates for the people who will use and buy your product.
Imagine you’re a founder focused on bringing your product to life. You need to move fast, and often with few resources at your disposal.
Many times, founders jump immediately to design because that’s how you get to the end goal, a working product, quickest. But we encourage our clients to go deeper. As their partner, we help them think about business outcomes and how it’s possible to achieve them (and often achieve them faster) with carefully crafted product strategy.
Because of this approach, our product managers always support our product designers. With both perspectives, you’ll get more than a product that works. Your product will be more valuable and usable, built to address real problems for your users.
“We’re both doing the same thing, deep down: we’re advocates for the user,” Kate Harrison, Product Manager, said about collaborating with product designers. “We’re just looking at the user from different angles.”
Defining a client’s ideal user and their needs lets us move faster than competitors. It allows us to focus on other details that grow a business, including who will buy the product and how they’ll learn about it.
This is exactly what happened with our client Canvas. We partnered to create a new text-based interviewing platform through our product management and product design process. Then, we helped Canvas define their brand, using our clear understanding of the product to lead the way. We added the brand details we knew would resonate with Canvas users to product updates. Thanks to our early work with the product, we also knew which features needed to be shared on Canvas’ website to connect with the right buyers.
Our cross-discipline solution accelerated Canvas’ growth at a critical moment. From our work together, they entered the market with confidence, a product built for real people and a plan to efficiently scale their product over time. And the market responded — Canvas was acquired in just two years.
It prioritizes outcomes and the concepts that get us there.
All conversations with our clients start with the question, “what’s the end outcome you’re hoping to reach?” Then, we make a plan.
Product managers define this plan. From day one, they identify the vision and create a roadmap to get us there. They keep our teams focused on the goal while also looking for new product opportunities that didn’t exist in the beginning. Then, it’s up to our product designers to make the best design choices and communicate the ideal technical path.
Our product managers and designers collaborate at every stage. They share ideas and ask questions. They develop concepts together. They challenge each other’s conclusions. Both sides hold each other accountable to what’s best for the user. Instead of only focusing on immediate actions, designers ask their product managers, “what else are we not considering that can help us reach the right outcome?” This accelerates the long-term goals of our clients, helping them reach the outcomes they need today and uncover new growth opportunities.
“Every time we meet, Kate will say something that helps me think about the design differently,” said Piyush Dawande, Product Designer. “We never go into these conversations with any idea held in high regard. What comes out of our meetings is a combination of both our brains. We’re thought partners.”
It’s the best of both worlds. You’ll move your product forward knowing every detail is informed by strategy. And you’ll do so quickly with expert design execution, every step of the way.
In short, our cross-discipline process empowers us to:
- Visualize the best outcomes for our clients.
- Choose the right concepts we need to build to achieve our chosen outcomes.
- Bring those concepts to life with excellence in definition and design.
- Discover and respond to new opportunities that result from the initial plan.
- Multiply impact on business growth through product.
The Result? A Better Product
When a founder comes to us to create an MVP, the conversation doesn’t end there. What could have been a straightforward UX design project becomes something deeper. Something that looks beyond the present need to the future of a business.
We consider not just who will use the product, but who will buy the product. Using our cross-discipline approach, we keep ourselves and our clients aligned and enabled to bring even the most complex product visions to life.
Learn how our buyer and user solutions can accelerate your growth.
