Digital Product Development

Product development in 2024 - the old way: • Design low-fi wireframes to align on structure • Create pixel-perfect Figma mockups • Socialize designs with stakeholders • Wait weeks for engineering capacity to build • Build core functionality first • Push "nice-to-have" animations to v2 • Ship v1 without thoughtful interactions • Iterate based on limited feedback • Repeat the cycle for 3-6 months Product development in 2025: • Quickly prototype in code with AI tools like Bolt • Generate functional prototypes in hours, not days • Deploy to real URLs for immediate testing • Add analytics to track actual usage patterns • Test with users while still in development • Designers directly create interaction details • Engineers implement interaction details by copying working code • Ship v1 with thoughtful animations and transitions • Iterate rapidly based on both qualitative and quantitative data • Implement improvements within days Last week, we hosted William Newton from Amplitude to share how this shift is fundamentally changing their product development approach. "I made those interaction details myself. I made those components myself, and I sent them to my engineer and he copied and pasted them in." Features that would have been pushed to "future versions" are now included in initial releases. Loading animations, transition states, and micro-interactions that improve user confidence—all shipped in v1. This approach doesn't eliminate the need for thoughtful design and engineering. Instead, it changes the order of operations: - Traditional process: Perfect the design → Build the code → Ship → Learn - Emerging process: Prototype in code → Learn while building → Ship with polish → Continue learning The limiting factor is shifting from technical implementation to your taste and judgment about what makes a great experience. When designers and PMs can participate directly in the creation process using the actual medium (code), they make different—often better—decisions about what truly matters.

You cannot guess what to do with your website or app. No feature, no matter how big or small it is, how much of a 'quick win' or 'no brainer' you think it is, how much everyone 'likes' it, or even how much research and data you based it on, has any guarantee of actually working. Many will have the direct opposite effect that you think they will. Product development is therefore an enormous risk. It's a risk because you are very likely to spend money that is pointless, but also because you might actually damage your business at the same time. You cannot afford these risks! Even when product teams try to incorporate testing into their plans, this is almost never effective because the right processes are not embedded. Testing a feature after it is built does not help if it does not work and you just spent a ton of time building it. In order to de-risk your investment in this area, you need a process whereby every single idea is initially subjected to the same question: > What is the smallest possible thing we can test/analyse that validates the assumption(s) within this idea? < There is ALWAYS a way to do this, no matter how big and complicated the idea might seem. If your initial test works, how do you evolve that to something slightly bigger? If THAT works, what is the MVP version, and so on? Only by taking this approach can you avoid the risk of wasting money and damaging your business. "But it will slow us down!" - Why do you want to be fast to market with the wrong thing and waste a load of money?? Also, it is actually far faster because all your ideas can be tested very simply and quickly rather than sitting in a 'roadmap' for 2 years. #cro #experimentation #ecommerce #digitalmarketing #ux #userexperience #productdevelopment