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New Digital Products

Products that open a new line of business.

Turn expertise, data or a service idea into a product, starting with a working prototype.

Solutions · Digital Product

Organizations are often sitting on something that could be a product: expertise clients already pay for, data nobody else holds, a service customers keep asking for.

We define the product, put a working prototype in front of real users, and build the version that goes to market. The people who shape the idea stay with it until it launches.

Why this is newly possible

Until recently

For most of the last twenty years, a new digital product needed a large budget before anyone outside the room saw it. Discovery, design, a back end, apps for two platforms: months of work, committed before anyone knew whether people wanted it. So organizations with good ideas mostly didn’t try.

Now

AI-assisted development has changed the arithmetic. A working prototype, with real sign-in, real data and a real interface, can now be in users’ hands in weeks. That doesn’t make products cheap. It makes the first, most uncertain step cheap enough to be a reasonable decision instead of a bet.

What hasn’t changed

Functional software is easy to make now, and a lot of it is being made. A product people trust, come back to and pay for still depends on judgment: what to build, what to leave out, and how it should feel on first use. That judgment is what you hire us for.

Where good product ideas come from

The strongest rarely start in a brainstorm.

  1. Expertise turned into a tool

    The judgment your team applies in every engagement, whether that’s assessing a site, pricing a job or coaching a manager, given a form clients can use on their own.

  2. Data turned into a service

    Assessments, records, research or usage data you already collect, turned into something people check every week because it tells them something they can act on.

  3. A process turned into the business

    A stressful, paper-heavy task your customers dread, made simple enough that people choose you for it.

  4. A new line for an audience you already have

    Members, visitors or customers keep asking for the same thing. Now it’s something they can subscribe to, book or buy.

  5. An internal tool others would pay for

    Some of the best products start as something a team built for itself, until it becomes clear the whole industry has the same problem.

Not every good idea is a product.

Would someone outside the organization choose it, come back to it and tell someone else about it?

Productortool?

People would seek it out on its own

It’s a product.

It needs to be designed as one, with its own audience and its own reason to exist. Products carry obligations tools don’t, such as support, privacy and pricing, and we’d rather surface those early than discover them after launch.

  • Onboarding
  • Support
  • Pricing
  • A brand people recognize
  • A plan for when usage grows

It makes existing work faster

It’s a tool.

It’s still worth building, and that’s the work described under Operations & Reporting.

See Operations & Reporting

Test it before you build it

  1. Define

    We start with the people the product is for and the organization behind it. Who is it for? What do they use today instead? Why would they switch, and what would they pay? The answers become a first version that is deliberately narrow: what it must do, what it can skip, and the one or two questions it needs to answer.

  2. Prototype

    The prototype is working software. It uses real data where it can and runs on the devices your users carry. We put it in front of those users early, watch what they do, and change it quickly.

    What people do with a prototype is far more useful than what they say about a concept.

  3. Decide

    At the end of the prototype phase we recommend whether to build, change or stop. Stopping is a legitimate result, and finding out in weeks costs far less than finding out after a launch.
    • Build it
    • Change it
    • Stop

  4. Build

    When the prototype has earned it, we build the production product, on the web or mobile. That’s where the less visible work lives: secure sign-in, payments where needed, a design system that holds as it grows, integrations with your systems, analytics you can act on and accessibility built in, plus a name and identity if the product needs its own.

AI in the product, where it belongs

Many of the products worth building now couldn’t exist without AI.

  • When AI is centralWe design around what it does well and plan for what it gets wrong, with review steps, visible sources and limits users can see.
  • When it’s optionalIt has to beat the plain version: a search box, a filter, a form. Often it doesn’t, and we leave it out.
They read what people write every week, turn scattered data into a clear recommendation, or answer questions from a body of expertise.

What it can lead to

  1. A decision made on evidence

    You’d know whether people want it, and what they’d pay, before the big budget is committed.

  2. Reach beyond your team’s hours

    Your expertise, data or service could reach people you’d never have time to serve one by one.

  3. A product that keeps getting sharper

    Each release could build on what users actually did, instead of what anyone guessed.

After launch

The first version of a product is the start of learning about it.

We plan the months after launch with you:

  1. 01watching how people use it
  2. 02fixing what gets in their way
  3. 03deciding what the second version needs

  • We support what we built and keep developing it with you.

  • If your team takes it in-house, we set it up so they can.

Related

The expertise behind it

All expertise