How we support Product Development with Chapters
The success of a digital product doesn’t just depend on the skills and experience of the people designing and developing it. Your product relies on the skills and experience to be found within the whole organization. But how to get everyone involved? Our solution is something that we call ‘chapters’ – specialist groups that support our Full Cycle Product Development approach. Read on to learn what chapters are and how we use them.
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How we build products with Full Cycle Product Development (FCPD)
At Boldare, we use a Full Cycle Product Development approach (closely linked to Lean Startup methodology and Agile practices) when creating your digital product. Based on the natural life cycle of digital products, the approach consists of four sequential phases: prototype, minimum viable product (MVP), product-market fit, and scaling.
The basic advantage of this approach is the use of specialist teams (Rapid Services, Product-Market Fit, and Scaling) dedicated to a specific phase. What’s more, the development process becomes more flexible and adaptive to the changing needs of the market, allowing the product to evolve and improve. This means we reduce the risk of a product failure while maximizing ROI.
What is a chapter?
The FCPD way of working enables us to bring the appropriate specialist skills to bear on a product, depending on its stage of development. Alongside the flexibility and the high-quality results, this approach also carries a risk: with this kind of team specialist structure, silo working becomes possible.
Individuals may become restricted to their own team and unable to reach out and access the skills and experience of the wider organization. Clearly this is not in the best interest of the product, or our clients. The answer is chapters.
A chapter is a group of people. It’s not defined by the product or team that they’re working on. In fact, the members of a chapter are usually working on a variety of different products with different development teams. A chapter is defined by shared knowledge, shared skills and shared experience. And it exists to expand and share that knowledge throughout Boldare.
In other words, each chapter is a repository of knowledge, relevant to different aspects of product development, and available to all. So far, Boldare has established two chapters: Measure & Learn, and Build.
What Chapter Measure & Learn is all about?
The Build-Measure-Learn cycle is the fifth key principle of Eric Ries’ Lean Startup methodology. It advocates a continuous process of development, constantly seeking feedback and user input. Put simply:
- you build a version of the product (a prototype or MVP),
- you test it with target users and measure their reactions and feedback,
- then learn from that data to inform the next stage of design and development.
The Measure & Learn Chapter consists of research specialists as well as experts in analytics, metrics, and user research. The members of Measure & Learn understand the tools, processes, and frameworks that can be used to validate product hypotheses as effectively as possible.
The purpose and aim of this chapter is to educate and support product teams to apply such techniques to their work. With chapters’ help, development teams better understand how each feature and functionality impact users and guide the direction of development accordingly. The result is products that are optimally adapted to their target users’ needs. Chapter Measure & Learn also specializes in:
- Data gathering and measurement approaches
- Data analysis tools and methods
- Validation techniques
- Metrics
How does this work in practice? At any time, a member of a product team with a specific problem (related to the above issues) can approach Measure & Learn for input and assistance. It’s simple as that.
What’s more, they actively promote the Chapter across the organization, joining other teams, setting up ‘education slots’ in meetings, and thus ensuring that developers know where to go and who to talk to when they run into a brick wall.
Measure & Learn is far from being a static entity. Acting as a kind of ‘ground control’ crew for their colleagues, Measure & Learn is constantly seeking to expand its knowledge and resources, conducting experiments and research. All that to ensure they can offer the best support possible.
What is the purpose of Chapter Build?
If Measure & Learn’s focus is on understanding product users and their needs, the Build Chapter (as the name suggests) places its spotlight on the actual building of the product during the different FCPD phases.
Members of Build are specialists in product-building tools and techniques. Just like Measure & Learn, Build’s membership is interdisciplinary, including:
- developers,
- designers,
- scrum masters,
- QA engineers,
- as well as other roles necessary in product development.
The key way in which Build supports our clients’ products is by maintaining the Tech Radar resource. Tech Radar is an internal search engine for colleagues’ competencies. Whatever the product build issue or challenge is, Boldare product teams can search Tech Radar and find colleague (or more often, colleagues) with the competence, experience and technology expertise that they need. In effect, Tech Radar is our resource library containing all the latest, tried, and tested platforms, frameworks, techniques, and tools required for product development.
As with Measure & Learn, the Build Chapter conducts its own research to ensure Boldare stays at the vanguard of what’s possible with digital products. Members organize workshops and other internal events to bring new tech developments to their colleagues in the product teams – all part of Boldare’s culture of knowledge exchange and transfer.
In a sense, the Build Chapter is the technological foundation of all Boldare activity, ensuring that the best and most appropriate tools and techniques are available to product teams, suited to their product’s phase of development.
Do members of the chapters work with clients?
In case you’re wondering, the members of the Measure & Learn and Build Chapters also work hands-on as members of product teams, constantly applying their knowledge and experience to their own projects. This is important in order to avoid Chapters becoming some kind of ‘ivory tower’, specializing in theories and ideas.
At Boldare, we favor a more practical approach – our Chapter members are there to support their colleagues and help ensure product quality across the board, while also working in “the real world” with digital products.
Benefits of using chapters
Hopefully, by now the benefits are clear. Boldare’s chapters act as innovation hubs, each with a specific focus, and both dedicated to supporting product development across the organization. Instead of relying on individual acquisition of knowledge and experience, our chapters seek out the latest and best resources. Then, they ensure that these resources are available to each dedicated product team, according to the type of work it is doing (prototyping, developing an MVP, ensuring product-market fit, or scaling an established product).
In product terms, this means better quality digital products that are more closely aligned with users’ needs. Those needs are more accurately identified, explored, understood and then used to guide the development process. Better, more stable digital products, delivered faster.
For our clients, this means their business goals are addressed and achieved, with more successful products that bring a higher and/or more rapid return on investment.
Innovation chapters for better digital products
The Measure & Learn and Build Chapters are key elements in Boldare’s innovative organizational structure. We have created rich resources for our individual product teams, that encourage wide-ranging knowledge sharing and innovation across the company, resulting in better quality digital products and ROI for our clients.
This additional layer of tech support means that even though a product team may only consist of a handful of individuals, they are bringing the accumulated knowledge of 200+ specialists to each project. If you want to explore how your digital products could benefit from Boldare’s unique FCPD + Chapters approach, get in touch – we’re here to help.
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