But how exactly do you measure the return on investment of your digital product? In the digital age, it’s rarely just one measurement and it varies for each product. That being said, most products drive value in one of a few ways:

• Direct product sales
• Customer satisfaction/retention
• Employee productivity
• Equipment utilization
• Process optimization

Let’s take a closer look. 

Value Driver #1 – Product and Service Sales  

When most people think of digital product development, improved sales tend to be the first benefit that comes to mind. 

The most apparent value driver of an externally facing digital product is to help increase your sales, which are tied to your core competencies and represent your primary source of revenue. They are the backbone of the business and allow you to finance other products, functions, or activities along the way.

A digital product can drive product sales in one of two ways:

• Directly – The digital product creates new value for both the business and its potential customers.  For instance, the Starbucks mobile app added the “Order+Pay” feature, which provides users with an easy way to order and pay directly from their phone on-the-go. Naturally, this helps increase drink purchasing since shoppers who would otherwise turn away from a long line no longer have to wait. 
• Indirectly – Often, a digital product can enhance or augment the core product without generating direct revenue. For example, adding digital products such as AI to a manufacturing process can create new efficiencies that improve a product’s quality and reduce production errors. When that occurs, the price point of the product goes up and the cost of waste goes down.  

Regardless of how your product impacts your sales, it’s vital that you take the time to chart a customer’s purchasing journey. This will help you gain a deeper understanding of what the customer wants, their specific pain points, and the ways that a digital product could address those issues.  

Value Driver #2 – Customer Satisfaction/Retention 

In a day and age when the customer has easier access to reviews, more ways to shop, and various alternatives to choose from, customer loyalty is more fickle than ever. Simply put, it’s harder to get new customers and more difficult to keep them.  

Customer satisfaction and retention are amongst the most important elements for any business to consider. Happier customers, especially those that feel valued and heard, are loyal customers. If you work to win them over, they’ll stick with you, whether that entails repurchasing products or renewing contracts.   

Much of customer retention is directly related to customer satisfaction. The question at the heart of this is—did the good or service meet their expectations about:

• Quality
• Pricing
• Customer service
• Efficacy
• Appearance

 Digital products can help improve customer satisfaction and retention in one of several ways, such as creating conveniences or improving communication. 

This could be anything from developing chatbots that answer quick questions, to streamlining customer service operations digitally, to mobile app development to make it easier to order your product or access your service straight from their mobile device. A lot of what makes an application or digital product easier to use comes down to the customer experience. Does the product have an intuitive UI and UX? Can the customer find what they are looking for easily and without unneeded steps? Being able to answer the questions is the bedrock of a solid customer experience. 

When going through the design process, understanding your target audience is key to creating your first digital product. If your business model works, be sure your new product is user friendly and benefits the customer. 

By understanding the customer and then creating your own digital product that meets their needs, you can improve the customer satisfaction metrics critical to customer loyalty and retention.  

Value Driver #3 – Employee Satisfaction = Employee Productivity 

For a business to thrive, your employees should ideally believe in what they do and enjoy it to boot. By better providing ways of working that are less time consuming, you’ll see not only an uptick in employee satisfaction but in productivity as well. 

Digital product creation can optimize employee workflows and help them excel in their roles. It can also streamline processes, or help them overcome obstacles that might negatively impact employee satisfaction and retention. 

For example, let’s think about an application that increases the ease and speed of executing complex tasks, whether in the office or on the go. This makes it simpler to get tasks done and reduces employee frustration.

Or there could be software that filters data to help predict which customers are more likely to be repeat customers. This information would augment sales reps’ ability to use their time efficiently by targeting the most profitable customers.  

When employee productivity increases, that positively impacts your bottom line. Although it may take a while for those benefits to manifest, they can be significant over the long haul.

Value Driver #4 – Equipment Utilization 

Similar to your employees, it’s mission-critical that your physical capital—tools, machinery, property, and buildings—is being utilized efficiently. 

At its core, utilization is all about ensuring that every piece of equipment is not only working but creating value. This could be anything from maximizing physical manufacturing output to improving table and bar seating at a restaurant.

Digital products can utilize machine learning and AI to gauge capacity and availability and then optimize them in order to rescue capital expenditures. For example, McKinsey writes about the impact of digital product creation in the world of manufacturing: 

Many large manufacturers are starting to use data analytics to optimize factory operations, boosting equipment utilization and product quality while reducing energy consumption. With new supply-network management tools, factory managers have a clearer view of raw materials and manufactured parts flowing through a manufacturing network, which can help them schedule factory operations and product deliveries to cut costs and improve efficiency. 

By analyzing your equipment utilization, you can strategize more ways for digital products to drive value or create new solutions to old capital investment problems. 

Value Driver #5 – Process optimization 

No matter the industry, every business relies on a series of processes that are tied to resources, decisions, and output. The speed and efficacy of these processes is a critical component of success. 

Today, digital product design and creation can improve efficiency and increase the quality of output. This optimization is largely accomplished via automation, which digitizes manual processes, allowing you to operate more efficiently. Additionally, there’s no need to waste resources on manpower that could be better utilized elsewhere. 

In a similar way, digital products can create new competencies within processes that make a business more:

• Customer-oriented
• Agile
• Innovative
• Streamlined
• Efficient
• Responsive to opportunities

Business process optimization typically involves addressing a mixture of both internal and customer-facing goals.  

 How Digital Product Development Partners Can Help You Drive Value 

Do you have an idea for an application or digital product that could drive value and change the way you do business? Whether it’s a bold new idea or an update to an internal application, actually creating the digital product is easier said than done. 

Building out a digital product that delivers the desired value and provides a positive end-user experience requires the proper infrastructure and resources. Many digital products inevitably fall short because a business is unable to execute its vision internally. This is why a growing number of companies are turning to digital product development partners to help them turn their dream to reality. 

But what is the value created by partnering with digital product development firms? 

• Provide a full-service team – Maybe you have a great digital product idea but lack the team to build it out. A digital product development firm can step into the role as a full-service product partner that works to:
  • Help you further define your idea and validate market demand for the product
  • Design and develop your product
  • Launch the new product to market
• Uncover business problems and solutions – What if you know that you need to make some changes, but don’t know what that would look like or require? Digital product development firms can help identify your business’ core problems and then come up with new solutions. Together, you can take a concept from the drawing board to launch. 
• Train your team – Do you have the internal resources but think they need to brush up on their skills or new technologies? Corporate training arms your engineering and design teams with the skill they need to code more efficiently and create digital products internally.
  
• Increase your team’s output – Perhaps you have an existing engineer and design team but need some gaps filled or you can’t devote all of your staff to a given project. Senior engineers and designers can be enlisted to come on board as a part of or as leaders to your internal resources. This ensures that you have guidance, mentorship, and a final product that delivers on both design and code quality.

Big Nerd Ranch – Driving Value with Product Creation 

You can have a brilliant digital product idea, but you need to know how to develop it. When they’re created the right way, digital products can drive direct and indirect value in a number of ways. But you have to make sure that they are, in fact, made the right way. 

Enter Big Nerd Ranch. 

We’re digital product creative experts that can help you unleash your potential, whether that’s filling in the gaps, providing a full-service product team, or training your existing employees to broaden their skill set.  

Our mission is to create an environment for continuous improvement and growth, both within our organization and yours. 

Want to drive value with digital product creation? The Nerds are here to assist. 

Sources

McKinsey. Digital manufacturing: The revolution will be virtualized

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If you talk with or are a a sales representative of B2B sales or product organizations, you’ll eventually learn the answer to the question: “How can a company’s salespeople help with product development?” In the best-case scenario, the product and sales teams collaborate closely, negotiating current needs with future strategy, and technical viability with ground-breaking ideation. In less ideal situations, the working relationship between product managers and sales managers can be fraught with tension and friction, as each role’s needs are seen as in direct opposition to the other’s.

Let’s compare and contrast the two customer service roles in an all-too-neat way, for argument’s sake:

Product managers often gather product feedback from a minimum of two sources: intentional user/market research, testing, prototyping, and news from the field via sales. The benefit product managers have is in the more formal and targeted feedback gathering approach. They synthesize the data to generate user personas, working with designers to approach changes in UI and UX to change behavior outcomes in their existing customers, and with developers to determine the technical viability of their proposed solutions.

Sales managers and account managers gather feedback directly from the customers they’ve spent their time and energy building relationships with in order to sell their products. Their feedback sources usually come from their customers’ business owners or decision-makers that are thinking about how the product affects their company’s bottom line—both pre and post-purchase.

A pejorative way of looking at this comparison is that product folks are strategic and long-term-driven, and sales folks are tactical and short-term-driven. Rather, it’s better to think about each role as gathering data from different sources and validating each other’s feedback in the interest of achieving their company’s business outcomes.

I reject the notion that sales and product management should be in opposition. Instead, I think their partnership sits on fertile soil for which amazing results can be grown. Here are just a few ways sales and product management can enable each other’s success.

Passively Shadow Each Other

Yes, time is in short supply and we’re all terribly busy. The sales force have to listen and learn from their customers about immediate needs, and product management has to listen and learn from customers to determine product direction. Allowing a salesperson to shadow and observe a product manager’s activities around user and market research, especially if it involves interviewing customers or potential users, will help the salesperson to better understand and sell the product’s long-term strategy—particularly to senior leadership. Ideally, the salesperson can effectively function as a proxy for the product manager by gauging the customer’s interest in new directions the product can take (more on that below). Current customers will enjoy feeling empowered knowing their voice is contributing to the product’s direction.

Likewise, the product manager should shadow a salesperson on prospecting calls involving product demos or join on a sales trip, simply to listen and learn how a buyer thinks of the product’s value for their immediate business needs. Take heed, product managers: your products have to enable your B2B customers’ bottom line growth! It is important in this scenario for the product manager to actively listen to the interaction between sales and the buyer, rather than actively engage in the conversation. Two beneficial results come out of this interaction: 1) product managers grow in empathy for immediate needs, especially as it relates to the buyers’ financial interests, and 2) the salesperson and product manager can debrief on how the salesperson framed the value of the product to the buyer. The product manager may have some critical insight into how the salesperson can shorten the cycle with a take on the product’s value!

Learn From Each Other

At Big Nerd Ranch, we promote all learning-oriented activities company-wide. For example, we have a teaching club, where our instructors learn from each other on how to improve the teaching experience for our students. We have a bi-weekly event called Nerd Share Time. There, any Nerd can share what they’re learning—professional or otherwise—with everyone else.

Setting aside dedicated, recurring time for product and sales folks to teach and learn from each other would yield benefits for both teams and for the company at large.

You could start by discussing answers to questions such as:

• What new features are coming on the horizon?
• What have you learned from users in testing new features?
• What are our customers’ decision-makers saying about our products?
• What struggles are our sales team experiencing in the field that our product team can help with?
• What struggles is our product team facing in determining the direction that our sales team can?
• Are our combined activities achieving the business outcomes our leadership expects of us?

Actively Trade Places

This one is, admittedly, a bit of a stretch goal. During the sales process, time is precious and giving someone else the responsibility of engaging a prospect sounds risky. But the one or the few times product managers get an opportunity to sit in the salesperson’s chair and explore how the product aligns with a company’s business needs will reap many benefits in learning. They will develop deeper empathy for the pressures that a salesperson experiences in needing to earn the buyer’s trust and make their quarterly quotas to boot.

Likewise, it’s valuable to give the salesperson an opportunity to interview existing or potential users to develop new value streams. Since the point of user research and prototyping is to think about how the product satisfies the needs of the business’ end-users, a successful salesperson engaging in this exercise will have a newfound appreciation of thinking about how delivering positive value to end users benefits the buyers.

To summarize, the relationship between product and sales is ripe with creative opportunity. I would encourage teams to start organically, from the individual contributor on up, to explore how the teams can work together to make their products better. Sometimes, waiting for sales and product leadership to enact the changes may not lead to the changes we want in the time we want them.

Build bridges, find common ground, and learn from each other!

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Since its inception, Big Nerd Ranch has fully embraced the principles, practices, and procedures derived from the Agile Manifesto and its resulting methodologies. By design, we do not adhere prescriptively to one specific methodology (i.e. Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Scaled Agile Framework, etc). Instead, we believe in maximizing the value of practices and processes of those various methodologies by mixing and matching them to fit our daily needs. We do this because we place the greatest importance on the pillars of the Agile Manifesto, rather than solely on prescriptive models of a specific methodology. We eschew formulas for intrinsic motivation, action, and collaboration. A secondary motto that drives our culture is “Bias towards action.” Transparency, dependability, and proactivity are dispositions we aspire to in combating fear, idleness, and obscurity.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

We understand the critical importance of working closely together. We do this by prioritizing collaboration and communication as frequently as possible–not just within the product teams, but especially with clients and stakeholders. We promote frequent and recurring practices like daily standups, bi-weekly reviews/demos, and monthly retrospectives. We value best practices like pair programming, Agile design and development collaboration, and user research. Product teams will proactively schedule one-off calls with clients to pair on determining sustainable solutions as often as necessary. In exercising these habits, we endeavor to deliver high-quality solutions the right way, on the first attempt.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

We value the practices of continuous integration and continuous deployment. We drive our product development habits towards delivering valuable builds on a highly frequent basis. We do so by promoting Agile design thinking and execution, iterating repeatedly on the product’s user interface and user interaction with our clients and product teams until designs prove valuable. Our developers practice the habit of keeping their branches small, to maintain sustainability and momentum when delivering specific features. As a result, their pull requests (PR) are easily digestible and reviewable by their teammates. This allows us to merge multiple PRs on a daily basis. It is, therefore, not unusual for us to deliver shippable builds on a weekly basis.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

We tell our clients that we require their frequent and collaborative partnership. As mentioned above, we will bias towards bringing our clients into critical decision points as often as necessary to ensure that they know exactly what they’re getting. We see ourselves as stewards of our clients’ time, money, and value-generating products. And, thus, we let them down if we do not consistently collaborate with them on critical design and development decisions. We understand that critical decisions impact revenue potential, and want to ensure that we are enabling our clients to realize as much success and potential as possible.

Responding to change over following a plan

We embrace the fact that requirements change because customer behaviors, segments, and markets change. Our clients partner with us because we prove that we’re reliable partners that enable the freedom of our clients to make changes as their markets change–not contractors that are given fixed requirements thrown over a 10ft wall. Being responsive, adaptive, and flexible are necessary and vital characteristics of any modern company that builds software in a rapidly changing business landscape. It is for this reason that Big Nerd Ranch wishes to lead by example.

In summary, while we accept that good processes and comprehensive documentation are necessary and important, collaborative communication and being adaptive to the changing needs of our clients are foundational to our way of building digital products.

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Have you ever wondered what goes into a mobile app that you use on your smartphone? Wonder no more! There’s no magic to the apps we use. While we won’t dive into nitty-gritty details of a mobile app’s architecture, this easy-to-understand diagram should give you a good foundation to communicate your needs with us. We’ll start with this diagram here:

Let’s describe these parts, starting from the left:

At 9 o’ clock, you’ll see Services. Services contain the business logic and data sources for the app. Apps talk to these services through an Application Programming Interface (API), which you can think of like the cord that plugged into the back of Neo’s head. When folks talk about “the cloud”, this is what they’re typically referring to. These services may be first-party (built by the app’s company), or third-party (using one or more services made by someone else).

For example, in a peer-to-peer money transfer app, the first-party service may store the user’s preferences and transaction details, while a third-party service may be responsible for processing payments.

At 10 o’clock, you’ll see Libraries. Libraries are usually third-party “packages” of code that the app’s developers use to enable specific functionality out of the box. Developers use libraries so that they don’t have to write that functionality from scratch. For example, Android and iOS have proprietary libraries for built-in operating system features that developers can take advantage of, like using the operating system’s GPS capability or the fingerprint reader.

At 2 o’clock, you’ll see the App’s Codebase. This is the code that one or more developers are writing to build the app’s features and functionality. The code will reference the services’ APIs and will include the libraries that the developers use. The code also implements the user interface and interactions that the designer builds.

At 4 o’clock, you’ll see the User Interface and Experience. Designers are responsible for the crucial task of creating the look, feel, and experience of the app, which strongly influence how the user feels about it. The designer’s work is directly coded into the codebase by the developers, as I mentioned just previously.

These parts work together to make an app that you enjoy using!

From product ideation to distribution, Big Nerd Ranch is world-renowned for building best-in-class mobile solutions. We’d be delighted to work with you on designing and building your UI, APIs, or all of it towards an app that positively impacts your business goals.

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What makes Big Nerd Ranch instructors stand out from the rest? For one thing, we are students first. Yes, we author best-selling books and have trained over 17,000 designers and developers over the years. But we’re great teachers because we’re constantly learning ourselves. Need proof? Check out Kristin Marsicano, co-author of Android Programming: the Big Nerd Ranch Guide. Today we’re talking to her about her best tricks and tips for staying ahead of the game in an industry where two months might as well have been two parsecs ago.

Kristin, where do you turn when you need to learn something new?

Kristin: I turn a lot to my peers here at Big Nerd Ranch and other friends in the Android community. There’s so much information out there, and it’s really hard to weed through. It’s hard to find the right path to follow to organize the information. I usually start with the people I work with to get recommendations for their favorite resources for a given topic.

What’s a common mistake you see developers make?

Kristin: In general, not asking questions. Banging your head against the wall and not asking for help. There’s stigma, feeling like you have to know it all and do it all on your own without asking. I think that’s the biggest mistake.

How do you know if a training has gone well?

Kristin: In general, I judge how a class went based on how engaged the students were. If the engagement gets better over the course of the week, it shows me that they are thinking critically and developing a strong understanding of the material. If students asked a lot of questions and/or in-depth questions, the class was a success. It also indicates that they are comfortable in the classroom. I talk more about my experiences as an instructor in a blog post I wrote.

What advice would you give to yourself 10 years ago? 30 years ago?

Kristin: You have to be able to work with imperfect knowledge. There is no perfect solution. When writing code, or with anything, I get hung up asking if I’m doing it the right way; could I be doing it better; what are people going to tear apart here. Rather than worrying, I continually remind myself that learning through iteration is a powerful means to achieving mastery.

Also, I would tell myself to trust that things will work out. The path ahead might not unfold the way I expect or want it to at the time. However, if I keep on trucking, stay true to myself, and am kind to others, things will work out beautifully (even better than I had originally conceived). I never imagined I would be where I am today, nor that I would have gotten here the way I did. I wanted to be a high school math teacher. But I took a chance on studying computer science. And ended up still getting to teach. It just took a different route.

Conclusion

It’s easy to forget that even the experts struggle with fear and anxiety when learning something new. So the biggest lesson here is if there’s something you’ve been curious to try: leading a new project, learning a new language, taking an improv class… don’t let the fear stop you. And if you get stuck in the process, recall these takeaways from Kristin:

• Take a break! Stop banging your head against the wall and ask for help.
• Turn to someone you trust when learning something new.

If you need support on your learning journey, we’re here to help. Thousands of students have found success through our training, and we think you will, too.

Check out our corporate training, immersive bootcamps, or The Frontier – our newest path to advancing your skills. These short, practical videos bring Big Nerd Ranch experts to your screen on your time to guide you through the latest developments in iOS, Android, and more.

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When Big Nerd Ranch starts an app development project, it’s much more than finishing a list of deliverables within time and budget without talking to the client. Nay! We work hard to complete exactly what the client wants to see, based upon our weekly, and sometimes daily interactions with them. Our clients are highly involved collaborators in our product team—in fact, they are our Product Owners!

One of the things that separates us from the competition is that our clients walk away with better ways of building products and managing the development, in addition to their finished application. And at the end of develpoment, our goal is that our clients have a better understanding of what effective product ownership is.

What Is a Product Owner?

Technically, the Product Owner role is a part of the Scrum team, as practiced in the Scrum methodology. He or she represents the business and the customer, and lays out the feature roadmap for the team (developers and designers) to build their product on. That said, the Product Owner does not manage the Scrum team.

However, for the purposes of this blog post, we’ll co-opt that product owner role to mean our client partner who collaborates with to us to build their product.

You may be wondering… How is a product owner different from a product manager? Great question! In real-world practice, there’s a lot of overlap between a product manager and a product owner, and the differences in implementation change from company to company. In some cases, product owners are restricted purely to the defined responsibilities within the Scrum team. In others, product managers have a lot of influence over the product’s roadmap at a high level. And at other companies, responsibilities fall somewhere in-between.

Why Is the Product Owner Important?

Product ownership plays a critical role in being the voice of the client, whether working on your own product or partnering with Big Nerd Ranch to build a product. The product owner understands the market, the competition and the users’ pain points. With those valuable pieces of information, the product owner can determine what features should be implemented, and in what order, with respect to time and importance.

When our clients play the role of product owner, they maximize on their investment by providing us the vision, information and roadmap so that we deliver a highly sustainable product at first pass. By having an increased level of involvement from the very beginning, products get built faster, with more precision, and with greater return on investment.

How Can You Be A Great Product Owner?

Know the why.

We aren’t in the business strategy business, so we’re not going to tell our client product owner a feature is a good or bad business decision. However, understanding why they want that feature built, and its impact on their business, helps us determine how best to build it. When we ask them, “what does this feature do?” or “why is this feature important?,” we’re assuming they’re ready with an answer. Big Nerd Ranch is in the business of consulting on product development best practices—from engineering to process. Mixing clear “whys” into that equation makes for a winning formula.

Know the when.

Some features have more pressing timelines than others, depending on market, stakeholder or user needs. We’ll look to our clients to guide us through what is most urgent from sprint to sprint. We’ll do that by going through the backlog together, and ordering features to be worked on by priority. There are rare occasions, however, where the client has to introduce a new feature while we’re in the middle of building something else. At that point, we’ll initiate a conversation to dig deeper and see how the change impacts development downstream. Changing requirements do incur a cost, whether in time or money, so we want to make sure that we’re supporting our client product owner in the most sustainable and cost-effective manner.

Be available.

When it comes to availability and collaboration, we have the same expectations of our clients that we do of our fellow engineers. When our client product owners are available throughout the project to field questions or collaborate on solutions, the chance of us delivering on time and budget dramatically increases. This crucial responsibility delivers on all four of the main principles in the Agile Manifesto.

Speak your heart and mind.

When we’re building a product with agililty, we expect our client product owners to be vocal about their ideas, expectations and concerns. When both parties keep mum, however, it severely increases the risk of building a product that does not meet expectations. While we promise to give clients our expert opinions about how best to design and develop requirements, we expect them to continually keep us informed of what makes them happy through our various project management and communication tools. It cannot be understated: continual clarity and transparency is taxing. But the investment in honest and proactive communication lead to much greater success down the line.

See For Yourself.

At Big Nerd Ranch, we don’t maintain strict adherence to one agile methodology. Rather, we borrow the best practices among a handful of them to maximize on the values of building with agility. The same thing applies to product ownership. We’re not a Scrum-only company. But we do value the responsibilities of the product owner, and we love to help our clients be the best product owners they can be. Check out what one of our client’s had to say about his experience to see how this is done in practice.

Want to learn more about our entire app development process? Get in touch with our team to see how Big Nerd Ranch can help you meet your business goals.

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I recently attended the The Lean Startup New York Conference, an event that brings together entrepreneurs and corporate innovators who seek to learn about innovation and sustainable growth using the Lean Startup methodology.

Eric Ries’ methodology of building and growing a company, codified in The Lean Startup (2011), has caught on rapidly among tech entrepreneurs and established companies with a digital product portfolio. Many speakers and participants at the conference came from well-known companies—such as Etsy, Microsoft, GE, and The New York Times—providing many perspectives and examples of implementing Lean Startup within existing enterprises. More on that in a second.

A Brief Primer on The Lean Startup

At a very high level, The Lean Startup argues that the best way to build a product is to:

1. Build a minimum viable product to test a set of hypotheses.
2. Measure data against that set of hypotheses.
3. Learn whether the hypotheses have been validated or not.
4. Decide whether the product is onto something with those hypotheses, or if a new set of hypotheses should be considered.

The aim of The Lean Startup is to work efficiently through the cycle, in order to waste as little time and money in the effort to build the right product. For more reading on the methodology, visit The Lean Startup.

And back to the takeaways. Here are four in particular that I gleaned from this year’s conference:

Enterprises are Desperate for Renewal

Carefully consider the companies I listed above. Again, many attendees were from large, established organizations. None of them are startups. What is it about The Lean Startup that these types of companies find attractive?

I hypothesize that enterprises are fighting to stay relevant and become nimble. Maybe they think behaving like a tech startup will bring them success like that of Lyft and Airbnb. In other words, it could be the necessity to adapt to a rapidly iterative business landscape that attracts enterprises to this entrepreneurial model of growth. What I’ve seen from enterprise employees is that they are hungry for new and creative ways of engaging their customers for the present and the future. While they might not be startup entrepreneurs, I was encouraged to see their desire to further their knowledge, learn from others, and improve the way they operate within their companies.

The bottom line is this: large companies that are willing to experiment and trial-and-error new ways of growing, building digital products and engaging their customers are more likely to remain relevant.

A Lean Startup Culture Starts with Leadership

Speaking of a willingness to experiment, multiple speakers explained the importance of a company’s leadership to allow for experimentation. Let’s take a step back. The Lean Startup’s rapid build-measure-learn approach requires that leadership trust their employees’ rapid execution on new ideas and initiatives on behalf of their companies. Even better are leaders who take charge and require self-motivated employees seek new opportunities for company growth. How can leaders do this? Adopt the Lean Startup approach in management!

• Set targets for key metrics for these self-motivated “intrapraneurs” to work toward.
• Give them your trust and provide them the freedom to build upon their ideas quickly.
• Let determinations of success or failure be opportunities for learning, not for reward or punishment.
• Decide to continue, pivot or abort based on learning.

The Lean Startup model encourages leaders to allow employees to find ways of growing the company (meaning: generating revenue!) without fear. For more on this, I strongly recommend reading Jeff Bezos’ 2016 Letter to Shareholders where he touches upon his “disagree-and-commit” approach to leadership.

Minimum Viable Product is a Learning Tool

The term “minimum viable product” (MVP) really took off due to Eric Ries’ book. It has since become a used-and-abused term in the technology industry and most people not familiar with the Lean Startup definition probably have some mutated understanding of what it means. Indeed, even at Big Nerd Ranch, we throw the word around with casual flair.

However, we must go back to what minimum viable product actually is, and why its definition is critical to growing a prudent business:

A minimum viable product contains the least amount of code to achieve the most amount of validated learning.

An MVP is not a poorly-executed first version of the product. Nor is it what you think is the first set of features required to get success. Rather, an MVP is designed for learning, period. An MVP is built to validate or invalidate pre-determined metrics based on a set of assumptions about the product’s potential market. An MVP tells you whether your metrics are validating your assumptions correctly, or whether you need to go back to the drawing board.

Developers Need to Know Your Customers

Whether developers are part of a small or large company, it is imperative that they know their customers. At the conference, developers were given a potent warning: either intimately know how your customers feel about and use your products, or watch your products fail. This does not mean reading aggregated surveys or a summative report on market trends. It means actively engaging with your customers face-to-face, whether in person or through video.

Why the importance of face-to-face interaction? Because there’s a lot of meaning and context in facial expression, body movement and conversational tone that gets lost when reading surveys. When designers and product managers are interviewing current and future customers, developers should absolutely join in on the research by assisting or taking the lead in the interviewing process. Leaving it up to others to know how customers engage with their product makes developers far less effective at making positive impact. So when designers and product managers are improving on understanding their users, developers might maximize their output by asking, “Can I help you?”

Moving Forward with a Lean Startup Mentality

The Lean Startup has proven to intrigue both entrepreneurs and enterprises. At Big Nerd Ranch, we apply Lean Startup principles to building products for startup entrepreneurs, leveraging build-measure-learn approaches to minimum viable products. We do the same thing for our enterprise clients, ensuring that we waste as little time and budget as possible. How can you apply these takeaways to your own business and development process?

The post Why the Lean Startup Methodology Isn’t Just for Startups appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

In the world Big Nerd Ranch occupies, there are agencies and consultancies.

In general, agencies attract work geared towards brand, marketing, advertising and content. An agency might be a better fit if you need a digital brochure, or if your product is branding or marketing-oriented.

Consultancies, on the other hand, are more solutions-oriented and longer-term, with a strong focus on providing expert guidance. Big Nerd Ranch thinks of itself more like a consultancy: We deliver solutions by building products meant to deliver lasting value to our clients’ businesses. We provide our expertise in those realms as well.

And among agencies and consultancies, we stand apart. Here’s why:

• We do honest work.

  From sales to product development, we’re clear about what we do, what we don’t do, and why. Rather than pitching you spec work, we believe you want real, long-lasting solutions for your digital products. For this reason, we believe in the value of starting projects with discoveries and audits, rather than uninformed ideas. From there, we build with agility, where continuous learning and discovery lead to a product that really matters.

• We deliver long-lasting solutions.

  We design products with our clients’ business needs, their users and their devices at the forefront of our minds. And we develop it with an obsession towards quality and maintainability. We could build products designed for one-off purposes, but our expertise lies in creating sustainable solutions that truly meet an organization’s needs.

• Sales is a collaborative effort.

  Our business development team collaborates with engineers and project strategists throughout the sales process. We all have a voice in determining the viability of the business relationship. We’re not suddenly handed the work with a vague requirements doc and told to get to work.

• Our product teams are dedicated to the project.

  Our engineers aren’t split across multiple projects, anxiously tracking time between them. So our clients can rest assured that the project team is fully dedicated to the success of our client’s product.

• We’re opinionated.

  When clients sign a contract with us, they’re committing to seeing us as a partner—we’re experts who can guide them toward the best path. We build a lot of products for clients, teach the brightest engineers at the biggest tech companies, and write the definitive guides on software development. So we’re opinionated. And we’ll share our opinions because we want to see our clients succeed.

• We value close collaboration with our clients.

  We don’t like it when our clients disappear on us—at all. We’ll call them, ping them on Slack and email them again and again if we don’t regularly talk with them. When clients work with us, they’re a part of the team. And as much as we’ll learn from them about their business and their goals, they’ll learn from us about design and development values and best practices. We strongly believe that our clients will reap the rewards of this close collaboration.

One of our designers wrote about her transition from a large digital agency to Big Nerd Ranch. Reading it, you’ll get a front-row seat view of what we’re about–kindness, hard work and brilliance. And we’d love to bring you into the experience.

The post Big Nerd Ranch: We’re Not An Agency appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

Agile.

It’s probably one of the most used and abused terms in the world of software design and development today. Despite the overload, a lot of companies are still boarding the Agile train. And yet, you’ll find plenty of begrudging and cynical commentary online about how many folks aren’t actually doing agile design and development.

A deeper dive will reveal even more blog posts talking about agile’s demise or a particular agile methodology’s uselessness. Still, the spirit of agile development, as expressed in the Agile Manifesto, is by far the best way to build software at this time.

But, First…

Allow me to take a moment first to air a grievance:

Agile is not a methodology. It is a set of principles, even an ideology, sourced from the Agile Manifesto. Methodologies (or frameworks) have been developed over the years that aim to execute on the Agile Manifesto principles. These methodologies include Scrum, extreme programming (XP), and lean development, among many others. Therefore, it is appropriate to say that “Scrum is an Agile methodology” while it is inappropriate to say “We do agile and Scrum methodologies.”

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…

What We Don’t Do

Big Nerd Ranch also builds products with agility. Some of us Nerds (like me) obsess over the mechanics of various methodologies, eager to experiment with the latest and greatest in approaches to building software. However, we’re not strict adherents to any particular methodology. We’re not Scrum zealots, extreme programming purists, or kanban fanatics. Why? Because we accept that no one methodology will solve all of our problems. Rather, we appreciate the intent and goals of the those methodologies, and mix and match various practices to fit the project’s needs. We hold to each of them lightly, knowing that they are guidelines, not mandates.

For example, while we follow Scrum’s basic skeletal structure, we stop doing standups if we feel they’re really unnecessary, since the team and client are communicating so well throughout the day. In another case, the client may be so efficiently and thoroughly giving feedback on our iteratively delivered work that sprint reviews and demos become redundant. Or we might exercise some kanban principles by setting rules for ourselves to limit work in progress, working on one or two stories at most and never any more. This would reduce debt caused by inefficient multitasking. But we wouldn’t necessarily be ferociously calculating story lead times vs. cycle times, as some kanban disciples demand. We focus on delivery and communication, rather than being a stickler for rules that aren’t the right fit for the project.

What We Focus On

However, there are other things that we hold onto for dear life. Aligning with extreme programming practices, any chance we get to pair with other nerds or client engineers, we’ll do so, especially when it means ensuring success. Also, we’d never merge a particular branch into master until the code’s been reviewed by fellow Nerds. And even then, the code would have to pass unit tests before being integrated anyway.

At the end of the day, two questions ultimately drive our approach to process around product development:

• Is everyone (Big Nerd Ranch and our client) confident in each other’s ongoing contributions?
• Are our deliverables (design assets or code) built towards maintainability and elegance?

If the answer to these questions become “I’m not sure” or “no,” then we start implementing the appropriate methodology process(es) to right the ship. If the answer is “yes!” however, we throw off any burdensome and unnecessary weight. The purpose of a methodology is to ensure transparency and quality. The Scrum practice of doing retrospectives would be a helpful tool in gauging how the team feels about hitting those marks. Then adjust accordingly; nay, with agility!

The post Build Your Project with Agility, Not Agile appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

When there’s something new in the development world, we’re among the first to know about it. For the last 15 years, we’ve been putting that knowledge to work in our courses and in the apps we build for clients around the world.

If you’ve ever wondered how Big Nerd Ranch consults with clients, look no further. While you won’t find delicious trade secrets (eh, we don’t really have any), this post will give you a high-level view of what to expect when consulting with us.

How Do We Build?

Traditional development methodologies assume that needs, requirements and features are fixed, final and fully realized at the start. At the other end of that is an immovable deadline with a fixed budget. Many Bothans have died trying to build in those constraints—Big Nerd Ranch, however, adheres to Agile software development and design principles.

We prefer to say we build with agility, since the word “Agile” can be a loaded term. From a 10,000-foot view, it means that we defer to the idea that building software inherently comes with complexities, unknowns and risks. This is the unavoidable truth of building software.

From a 20-foot view, it also means:

• We ask the client to prioritize the features they want most on a week-by-week basis.
• We design and develop toward minimally shippable builds and build iteratively.
• We expect the client to communicate with us on a daily basis.
• We expect the client to regularly test and validate the work we deliver.
• We’ll be transparent through and through.
• We will prove our worth.

Prioritizing Features

It’s rarely the case that a client comes to us with a set of features or requirements and says, “I don’t care what gets built first. You pick!”

It’s far more often the case that clients need to meet an external demand, and a specific feature will meet that demand quicker than others. In other words, our client represents their customers and will know their customers’ needs. When our client determines our build priority, it ensures our client’s customers are happy, which keeps our client happy.

Building Iteratively

The goal of building with agility is to deliver value in short bursts throughout the project, rather than way at the end. Depending on the goals, we’ll either deliver miniature versions of the product as frequently as possible, or we’ll deliver a set of features towards that end goal.

Constant Communication

Let it be known: We expect a lot of our clients. Daily communication is the standard we’d like to set. Even more, we encourage our clients to join our Slack team and chat with us throughout the day. A highly attentive and collaborative client dramatically increases the chances of the client walking away very happy. And likewise, the client should expect that of us as well!

Frequent Testing and Validation

Our goal is to deliver value as frequently as possible. But the value that we deliver has to be proven, and that’s our clients’ responsibility. We don’t do QA. Why? Because the client knows best what they (and their customers) need.

Each week or two, we deliver work for a client to test and validate. The sooner the client provides us a thumbs up or thumbs down on the work we deliver, the sooner we can fix the problem and then move to the next set of deliverables. As an added bonus, clients always have insight to the project status—they aren’t left wondering what’s being worked on.

Being Transparent

We hate hiding behind a veil. We think the client should feel absolutely comfortable with our work, even if they might not understand all of it. In other words, we’re out to prove we’re trustworthy. And we do so by documenting, communicating and tracking work through multiple tools. We’re transparent with our successes, opportunities for improvement and even our opinions on what is best for the client. In turn, we ask the client can be as transparent as necessary about any roadblocks ahead, so we can find solutions together.

Proving Our Worth

There are lots of consultancies whose services cost less than ours. We know that. But at Big Nerd Ranch, we believe you get what you pay for. We don’t start low, then nickel and dime you along the way. Our engineers are also expert instructors and best-selling authors. When we consult with you, not only do you get world-class designers and developers building an elegant and sustainable product, you get an educational experience around proven design and development best practices and process improvement.

We love helping our clients be successful. Among the myriad ways to do that, our approach is essential to ensuring success. Whether you’re a Fortune 100 company or a startup client, we have the mastery, experience and care to help you be a more competitive player in your market!

66% of our current clients have already worked with us on an app development project. Contact our sales team to get started on a project of your own.

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