Living in the digital era is incredible. Quick access to various tools on your phone or a laptop is very convenient. Communication, social networking, and doing business is easy. But easy is not a word to use when creating digital products.

Expertise, experience, skills, tools, ambition, adaptability, good practices, and an effective team are among the essential things you need.

Here at UN1QUELY, we are investing in this idea the most. Great and ambitious people with renowned skills are the most important thing to us. I will try to define and cover the essential topics for building a digital product and explain how we do it.

Designing Products That Perform Superiorly

Having a great idea is astonishing, but the road from an idea to the end product is long and challenging. There are a lot of stages to complete to bring the product to the market, and our job is to build it.

Understanding client needs, scoping, designing the system, planning, preparing a road map, developing, and delivering. Those are the stages where we bring our expertise and skill.

Having a superior design is a crucial thing. Creating a great user experience and adding functionality in an intuitive, meaningful, and discoverable way is what I call good UI/UX design.

When building an excellent product that works as expected, I think more than simply a great UI/UX design. I also refer to design from a product’s functional perspective, about serving the user needs. Writing understandable user stories and good software design with appropriate architecture are all part of the great design we all hold in our minds. I have been doing a lot of product design lately with our team, which is highly creative and exciting.

Design happens in the early product stages. We expect full client collaboration, organized in repeated workshops a few times per week to examine things like the product domain and stakeholder expectations. We use this every opportunity to gather information for future functional stories. The better we plan in the beginning, the smoother the development will go.

Choosing the Team

Among the essential items is choosing the right team. People are the most valuable asset in the company, and that is how we see it and where we invest the most. Only with appropriate expertise and experience can you build outstanding products. (can easily be mistaken with many years of experience, which might not be accurate). Having a team full of highly senior people might not be a formula for building great products. Of course, seniority plays a role on its own, but having the right mix of experience, talent, ambition, and dedication is a suitable place to start.

Of course, being self-organized, having excellent communication skills, and having team spirit is super important for all of us at UN1QUELY.

The Significance of Planning

Planning is a pillar for development. When planning, our team envisions how product development should look from beginning to end. If already conceived by stakeholders, our team contributes to understanding the plan and helping with the next steps. This stage is more like general planning, where we try to create a structure and define all the steps for the development phase.

On the other hand, it is super important to introduce the complete delivery plan to stakeholders as early as possible. We advise creating a comprehensive road map and breaking delivery into smaller milestones, leading to fewer change requests and a more aligned way of delivering value. Change requests are costly since you are tripling the development time. If a feature is already delivered, we must design/plan and develop again for every change request.

After the roadmap is in place, we are doing regular planning in a more iterative way for single or grouped functionalities. (Covered entirely in the next part).

Choosing the Tech

This one should be simpler than you think. Think about what you need to solve, and do not bring giant artillery to solve simple problems. This is how I start. There is a lot of great tech to choose from nowadays, and most of it can do much.

Technology is evolving every day and becoming better and better every day. But which technology to choose for the client side, server side, database, and infrastructure? Ultimately, it boils down to which technology your team has experienced the most. The learning curve plays a significant role here; how much time you will spend on development depends on how experienced you are with the chosen technology.

Significance of Infrastructure

Depending on our team experience and client preferences, we use cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Also, having one dedicated DevOps engineer should be enough for some smaller to medium size projects, but that is project dependent. The idea here is to have a well-defined and organized managed IT environment. Here I would separate environments dedicated to the development team and environments dedicated to clients and end users.

You can have many environments, but one for development and another for quality assurance purposes is enough for the team. On the other hand, you need one production environment if the product is live and one simulating production environment for your code releases to test your releases in a production-like setting.

Now when you define and set up your environments, the next is to cover one of the most important things: deploy and run your solutions as fast as possible. Here we need to understand the process of deploying and running for short CI/CD, a whole pipeline for continuously integrating and continuously delivering your chunk of software.

This means using your versioning tool to give your chunk of software a way to integrate from your local environment to your chosen code hosting platform and then build your projects and run tests. If everything goes as planned, that chunk gets integrated into the rest of your project software. This is the continuous integration part.

After integrating, what is left is to prepare your chunk of code and release it to your environment. This is done automatically by your continuous delivery automated process.

To Be Continued

Here I have covered some basic things about the team, planning, technology, and infrastructure. In part two, we will go in-depth into some practical things about software design, secure software development life cycle, project management, documentation, etc.