At Ballast Lane Applications, we work with clients in different ways. As COO and responsible for all client delivery, I cannot play favorites, but the “full service product development” does have a special place in my heart. I love to work with a great team of enthusiastic people to build digital products from start to finish. We provide a complete team with all the capabilities to deliver brand new digital products, or new features to enhance existing products. A typical full service product development team would include the following roles and activities:
- Product Definition: Defining what the problem is we are trying to solve for, and for which users. What is the business case, what value and experience is being offered to the user?
- Product Design: Designing, refining and detailing the product ideas into clear and detailed specifications; what should be done, what is the input, and what is the output? Designing the user experience and the user interaction, the steps, the screens the user is going to use.
- Development: Now that the requirements and specifications are clear, the tech team starts their work. They will think about the technical implementation and the architecture of the digital solution/product. They will build the web application, or mobile app (iOS and/or Android) that you need, and take care of all the logic and data that is required for your product.
- QA & Testing: Nobody is perfect. We have very skilled developers but every once in a while they make a typo, or miss a part of the requirements or interpret it differently than was the intention of the product owners. This is where QA & testing comes in. Not only do they check if what is built works as specified, they will also make sure that it makes sense and the experience is optimized. That ensures that a user understands how it works and that they can use the product without any problems to get the desired outcome.
- DevOps: A silent force in the background, you won’t notice that you need them until you need them. Our DevOps team makes sure the developed solution is stable, is performant and scalable and can easily be maintained. They set up the servers, make sure that deployments can be done automatically, and implement the alerts to monitor the product to make sure everything is running well. If it is not, they are the first to step in and work on a solution.
- Client & Project Management: The client and project management team will make sure that we have the right people on the right tasks at the right moment, and that everyone has everything they need to work flawlessly together. They will be the linchpin between you, and the team. They will create and maintain a roadmap, ensuring that deliverables stay on target in terms of budget and timeline, providing status updates and managing expectations as to when you can expect your product to be available.
The team described above should provide everything you need to get your product from an idea into the hands of your users! You provide the “what”,“why” and “for whom”, and the team will take care of the rest. Before you know it a few one liners written on a napkin will become a digital product that is ready to be unleashed!
If you want to know more about how full service product development works, check out our work on Annise or Sage, or feel free to reach out to us directly to see how we can be of any help.