Product Development Phases
A Reference Guide for our Clients
Although every product is unique and every project is different, there are some general steps that can be applied as a guiding framework. The following steps overlap and the order may change for certain projects. However, it should give you a good idea of what to expect.

1. Project Strategy and Setup
We create a private GitHub repository and project with initial milestones and grant access to team members from our organizations. We create project-appropriate labels to manage workflow and set preliminary deliverable dates on the milestones.
We schedule and conduct a GitHub project management conference call to provide necessary training on how project details will be discussed going forward. Register a free GitHub account if you don't already have one.
2. Competitor and Market Analysis
We conduct an in-depth competitor analysis using our premium research and analytics software such as BuiltWith.
For certain competitors, we enable change monitoring to keep a close eye on new developments and changes that may affect our venture.
If you have not already, prepare a list of direct and indirect competitors you are aware of.
Conduct a study of the target market to determine user personas we will refer to going forward.Try to provide us with as much information as possible on what the perceived audience is. If you have specific people you know that you believe are ideal users, we can use them as a baseline to extrapolate various preferences of others in demographics.
We try to establish technological familiarity and preferences to help guide the UX going forward. This information will be especially useful for interface design as well as marketing pages.


3. Technology Selection
4. Copywriting and Aesthetics
If applicable, procure necessary resources to create any marketing copy and designs for marketing pages.
Although we have designers and copywriters on staff, in some cases bringing on a contractor will make more sense, especially for niche industries we are not familiar with.
For designs, we utilize invisionapp.com which allows us to review them and iterate over concepts, much like GitHub is used for the codebase.


5. Development Sprints
6. Staging & Testing
This is when we run a closed beta. Identify and engage early adopters of the system. These are specific people that will use the application and provide critical initial feedback.
We will provide them with dedicated access to staging containers and login credentials if necessary.
We will also establish standard communication channels between our teams and these people to get their feedback quickly.


7. Launch
8. Monitor & Scale
With live traffic to the application, we will closely monitor new user behavior and on-boarding trends. Engineers will keep a close eye on resource usage and logs, analyzing them periodically. Meanwhile, the project managers will review user idea suggestions and bug reports.
Any actionable items will be brought up and discussed on GitHub as new issues, with a standard bi-weekly meeting to address any big-picture items. In most cases, we will provide a bi-weekly health report detailing visitors, conversions and other pertinent user interaction events to help us quantify growth and adoption.
