Join The Anti-Process, Process Club
Setting up your new D2C platform or digital product is a scary business - optimising your current offer no less so. It's going to cause even more anxiety when your company’s board insists on seeing results rapidly.
Marrying your customer needs with your business goals will be priority number one but ensuring delivery at speed will be high up there. Understanding how a robust (but flexible) process can deliver value will help get your product live (and help you sleep at night).
A little bit of background
December 31st 1999. It's the turn of the millennium. Basement Jaxx, Fatboy Slim, Prince and Steps ring out across the country with zero irony. NHS management waits on tenterhooks as the final seconds of the 20th century decisively and irreversibly disappear, awaiting the inevitable collapse of life-saving systems thanks to the promised bug - (sounds familiar).
A group of west coast software geeks are developing customer-focussed tools and a process oriented towards putting change as P1. These digital visionaries, perhaps unbeknownst to them, were laying the basic principles, the ground rules, for a new way of digital product building, that was to become both an invaluable tool at times engaged with as a religion.
Agile was rapidly weaponized; sold as a silver bullet to answer all strains of digital product prayers. Agile became a religious doctrine, evangelised with no less vigor than that of the street vendors of Brigham Young’s Church of Latter Day Saints.
At startups, corporates and agencies alike, we played with it for the next decades. And as we revelled in our new-found 'freedom', we found its limits too, uncovering the inevitable correlation of more features delivered in less time with a gradual deterioration of rigorous thought and planning.
Hard learnt through experience
At Candyspace, we've lived through it - hundreds of projects over. As a new epoch beckons, we back an approach grounded in common sense, maximum impact and making sure you get exactly what you need. Gone is the era of selling in processes 'uniquely positioned' to deliver on your challenge. Agile is not an inflexible religion, rather it’s a broad church .
We take the best of the bunch: with vast arrays of methodologies at our fingertips, and people from wide-ranging backgrounds, we bend to complex business challenges layering them with fresh user insights to turn them into digital products that tangibly enhance lives and help grow businesses..
“I’ve learned over the years that, when you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B-grade work.” Steve Jobs
It starts with listening really hard to your brief, and what's driving it. Then, we design a crack team for your specific challenge; we're hunting the careful balance of varied, contradictory experience with an ability to see the world differently.
It's these autonomous squads that take your brief on as their own, and make it happen for you, your customers and your business.
Key learnings that will deliver customer delight and business growth
Create Better. Faster. Together.
It's not all wild and free. Here's how we work.
Better. Regular user testing, built-in, focussed on testing for step-change behaviour, not acceptance.
Faster. As individuals, we take ownership of specific elements of your challenge over time-boxed sprints. Shippable work each fortnight to:
- Test with users
- Get your stakeholders pumped
- Keep your team excited about your mission
Together. It's not all on us. We'll figure this out with you - from the upfront challenge, to prioritising how we solve it, ship it and start changing lives.
