1. The best solutions are created by interdisciplinary teams

To build a solid digital product, the team that builds and further develops is crucial to the result. The right mix of skills and the framework conditions under which the team works is what has the greatest impact on whether the solution is good or not. Too often, the focus is on what features/functions a service should have, rather than being clear about what effect and business goals the solution should deliver on.

If you want to develop good digital services (that the end user actually wants), you must take into account that you will gain insight during a project. If you don't do that, you won't get a good result either. With an agile work methodology, you ensure quality in a delivery because it ensures speed and reduces risk in the development process. Every challenge and problem requires different approaches in order to be solved optimally.

At Forte Digital, we believe that the development of digital services and products is best done in interdisciplinary teams consisting of designers, technologists and business developers who have a common goal and desire to create the best solutions for our customers and end users.

2. Focus on the desired outcome, not features

The quote "Ask teams to achieve an outcome rather than to create specific output", from UX stars Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, is based on an issue that many people face. The biggest mistake many companies make when developing digital products and services is that they think they know what the customer needs. In other words; they think they know what features the customer wants in a digital solution.

The problem with such an approach is that you rarely have good enough insight into what the end user actually wants. It is also a very risky way to build digital services, both in terms of time spent and costs. A better approach is for the team to be given a set of goals to deliver on, and through early and continuous customer involvement, build, test and experiment their way to a product that actually delivers on both the end user's needs and business goals.

3. Give the team management tools and direction

"What is it that we actually want to achieve?" is a question that cannot be asked enough. Digital service development is business development. This means that you have to start from clear goals and outcomes. To achieve this, you need management tools and a set direction. It's what determines what the team will build and the quality of the solution.

Start early by defining goals, target groups and KPIs, rather than focusing on features and assumptions. There are a number of different tools available here. In our projects, for example, we have used the Lean Canvas methodology because it gives the team clear guidelines on what the most important and biggest problem is, what the goals and KPIs are, what the biggest assumptions around value propositions are, and what we think are the largest and most important target groups.

With these guidelines in place, it will immediately be easier to give your team a goal to work towards and a clear direction in the project.

4. Prioritize hypotheses and risks

Spend time with the entire team and decision-makers to identify what are the assumptions and risks that are most important to clarify early. What is it that is absolutely critical to get an answer to in order to see if the solution has the right to live? Try to figure it out before you spend time on details of the solution.

Early in the product development process, there is a lot of uncertainty and assumptions. Instead of going straight to the first and best solution/idea, formulate the assumptions as testable hypotheses and conduct quick experiments.

What is the assumption and how can you get it tested effectively?

Here we like to use digital collaboration tools and virtual whiteboards to formulate and prioritize the most important hypotheses to be tested first. When the experiment is complete, you will have gained insights and data that can validate or invalidate the hypothesis, and perhaps be the basis for new hypotheses that need to be tested.

With the new climate and diet service in the Trumf app, NorgesGruppen can deliver on its sustainability strategy while creating the best user experiences for its customers.

5. Choose relevant methods and tools

Be pragmatic and creative – how can you get answers to the biggest assumptions/risks as quickly as possible? Choose the tools that provide answers to the questions and that work in your organization/context.

What users say is not always the same as what they do, so it is important to combine both qualitative and quantitative methods. Such an approach provides value because you can choose a relevant method based on what you want to get an answer to. In some cases, for example, you need to do A/B testing or multivariate testing, where the goal is to get very fast feedback in existing solutions. Other times, you can use user behavior analysis tools such as heatmaps and session recordings to understand how users actually interact with the product.

Other times, you need to do in-depth interviews or targeted digital marketing campaigns to gauge interest. The most important thing is that you choose a hypothesis based on what tools you have and that the goal you have set yourself is based on specific success criteria, rather than building solutions and features that you do not know if will be used or not.

6. Work continuously with testing and validation

Build and plan for uncertainty. A well-functioning product team is not the team that delivers exactly what was said, but one that has the ability to continuously make decisions based on new insights and learning. Sometimes, basic assumptions are also wrong, which means that the course must be changed. That's the whole point. Don't try to confirm your assumptions, be open to the fact that there may be something completely different that gives the results you are looking for.

Also, test things as cheaply and as early as possible so that you can make decisions that keep costs down and become a product that end users are interested in. Embrace uncertainty and problems rather than trying to detail and build the first solution you thought of. This is how you get the fastest way to build products that are used and thus lead to the results you want.

In other words: Build, test, learn, repeat!