Supporting custom digital products post-launch: what good looks like

Custom digital products can solve complex business problems – unlocking solutions that help enhance the customer experience, improve your internal processes, and put you ahead of your competitors.

A custom digital product is a significant investment. Sustained value and maximum return-on-investment come from continuous evolution. 57% of product professionals say that continuous research and development improves custom satisfaction, and 42% say it impacts profitability.

In this post, we’ll look at what happens to custom digital products post-launch:

• Why iteration is essential
• What makes a digital product complex and what are some examples?
• What to expect from post-launch support/management
• Why a strategic partner beats managing it yourself

Iteration is essential

Successful digital products are continuously evolving. True value accumulates over time through improvements, optimisations, and careful alignment with the changing needs of your business.

That’s why we approach digital products with an agile methodology: allowing us and the customer to iteratively develop the product in sprints. This allows faster go-to-market, incorporation of customer/user feedback and more flexibility and adaptability to changing business needs and market conditions. Initial launch is just the beginning – your complex digital product will need to be carefully and continuously managed and supported to keep delivering maximum value.

What is a custom digital product?

Most commonly, digital products fall into three key categories:

• Web apps – applications accessed through your browser.
• Native apps – standalone applications accessed through a device, like a smartphone or tablet.
• Software-as-a-service – a centrally-hosted application that your organisation can access usually via a monthly or annual subscription.

Custom digital product examples

The possibilities are endless for custom digital products, as long as the idea is viable and the need is justified. But here are a couple of examples we’ve worked on:

• A customer-facing portal for connectivity-as-a-service provider Tiviti, enabling customers to administer their network and manage their subscription from a single place.
• A series of quote funnels for Utilita Energy, powered by headless web apps, that enable customers to get instant quotes for eco-friendly boilers and solar products, integrated seamlessly with their CRM system for up-to-date pricing and capturing of data.

What is post-launch digital product management?

In an agile methodology, you’re in a constant cycle of discovery and delivery, learning from the previous launch and using this to define your product roadmap. Once your digital product is out there in front of real users, maintaining a consistent experience with the current version is as important as focusing on the next iteration, ensuring you get maximum buy-in and adoption.

Putting all of this together, digital product management looks like this:

• Proactive monitoring – ongoing scheduled maintenance and updates to the platform to stay ahead of any potential issues.
• Performance improvements – identifying and executing optimisations for speed, scalability and reliability. This can include things like refactoring, which helps make the codebase more efficient and future-proof.
• UX optimisation – incorporating qualitative feedback and quantitative data to make tweaks and improvements to current and future iterations that improve the user journey.
• Iterative feature development – planning and delivering new functionality based on user feedback and business priorities.
• Governance and documentation – creation and maintenance of user, technical and process documentation.
• Strategic alignment – regular check-ins between product team, stakeholders and key decision-makers to align product development and management with wider business goals.

Why you need a strategic product partner

While having an in-house product team has its benefits, higher costs and internal resources can present challenges. Having the right strategic product development partner can help you unlock cost-effectiveness, efficiency and scalability you may not get by building an internal team.

Key benefits of having a strategic digital product partner include:

• Specialist expertise – the team that built your product will not only have in-depth expertise in your product, but also in wider tools and solutions that will help with continuous optimisation and enhancement. Visibility of other solutions and technologies outside of your business and your sector helps to bring additional, valuable insight to the process.
• Continuity – while the management of your digital product will be thoroughly documented and it’ll be designed to be flexible enough that you’re not tied to one supplier/partner, continuity from the build team to the team supporting it is beneficial, as they’ll have a deep understanding of the architecture and the decisions that have guided development.
• Focus – with technical management and development sitting with an external partner, your internal teams can prioritise core business tasks while your partner looks after and manages the technical ecosystem.

All that being said, selecting the right partner is essential to unlocking these benefits; a poor fit can jeopardise the project and the end product.

What good digital product management looks like

Earlier in the post, we shared some of the key elements of digital product management and post-launch support. But what does really good management look like?

• Communication – regular scheduled check-ins as well as transparent communication about what’s being worked on and when, so everyone is aligned internally and externally.
• Prioritisation – by jointly maintaining a project backlog and carefully planned roadmap, you and your digital product partner should be able prioritise feature development based on your business goals.
• Collaboration – although your strategic partner may be external, it’s important to treat them like an extension of your internal team, and that they simultaneously make every reasonable effort to integrate themselves with you and your processes.
• Transparency – consistent communication and thorough documentation will ensure you have visibility of the process. In addition, you’ll likely use a project management board/platform for additional transparency and a real-time view of who’s working on what, and when.
• Clarity – from the beginning of the project and/or partnership, a clear view of expectations, who’s responsible for what and key points of contact for each party helps to keep everything running smoothly.

Key takeaways

• The key to a successful digital product is iteration, continual development and support.
• Custom digital products are tailored specifically to the needs of your business and/or customers, and therefore need a tailored management and support plan.
• Proper post-launch management is critical, including proactive maintenance, performance optimisation, and feature development.
• Strategic development partners like Adaptable provide long-term value.
• Effective digital product management relies on transparency, collaboration and communication.

Let’s talk about how a strategic partnership can turn your digital product vision into long-term value. Get in touch to talk about your idea, and we’ll see how we can help.