What can a digital product agency do for me?

Digital innovation is an integral part of modern-day living. Every organisation is becoming a technology company in some shape or form.

Whether it’s transforming processes to streamline operations and the user experience (UX) or building a SaaS platform to improve the everyday lives of your consumer, technology is critical in building a sustainable business.

And the stats don’t lie. The digital transformation/innovation market was worth around $1,178bn in 2022 and is expected to grow to $2,643bn in 2026.

However, adapting isn’t just a case of designing and developing a product or platform. In this article, we explain the purpose of a digital product agency, and how they can empower you to solve core business problems through digital innovation.

What is a digital product agency?

Dealing directly with digital products, a digital product agency or studio helps businesses enhance and streamline specific and general processes through digital transformation and innovation.

And by digital products, we include all things from mobile apps to user interfaces and SaaS platforms.

A digital product agency deals with more than software design and development issues. Beyond surface-level software buzzwords, a digital product agency helps with core business problems.

Brands hire digital product agencies to help update and digitise their processes, enabling companies to function more coherently and cohesively in an ever-increasing digital market. 

From the services businesses offer to the products they sell and even managing the general “day-to-day”, there is no limit to digital product services, with digital product agencies ensuring every aspect optimises the user experience (UX).

With credible digital product strategies based on consumer needs alongside creative skills with a deep and embedded technical understanding, digital product agencies are fast becoming an essential part of our modern world. 

So, as you can probably tell by now, defining a digital product agency is difficult because they have the potential to transform entire businesses both with technologically advanced solutions as well as strategic insights. Different agencies can also have different specialisations or focus areas, such as e-commerce or, like Stoked, B2B.

But at least when you next think of a digital product agency, you’ll realise the digital innovation on offer improves companies to be more streamlined, productive, and coherent.

What does a digital product agency do?

Okay, with the general sweeping statements for our definition out of the way, we can now begin to discuss what digital product agencies do with more specific details.

1. Digital transformation

Within a world constantly propelled by the momentum of modernisation, businesses and even wider societal organisations and communities are digitising various services, products, and information to accommodate efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and progress across their operations.

Basically, anything involving any sense of user experience (UX) now bends to the will of digital transformation (DX).

Beyond a trending term, digital transformation is essential for all businesses, organisations, and communities. Whether you like it or not, DX is now how we learn, communicate, and connect with the world.

Digital product agencies offer businesses/organisations a pathway into modernity, so they can continue to engage and support their consumers and clients and not be left behind by fellow pioneering competitors.

2. Digital product design

Whether your company requires modifying existing processes or updating legacy software with new features as part of your digital transformation pursuits, none of it is possible without quality digital product design.

Digital product design allows you to create solutions with technology to solve user problems and meet requirements.

To create a successful digital product, digital product agencies must implement extensive and strict design processes before final development and eventual launch.

Now, digital product agencies should always design with value in mind. At Stoked, we follow this handy usability pyramid:

• Useful – Offers value to your user.
• Usable – Meets the required UX.
• Used – Becomes used through other external factors contributing to its success.

“Usability” is essentially the key to digital product design. Ensuring we satisfy each level of the usability period is why the digital products we help create will always offer value to the intended user.

As Steve Jobs once famously said, “Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”

3. Digital product development

With all your visual consensus and conceptualisations, navigation structures, feature mapping, and product architecture in progress, we now enter the development and implementation of your digital product.

At this stage, we smooth out any issues, conducting and assessing user feedback while trialling prototypes, MVPs and MLPs to ascertain the product’s capability for launch.

During development, your digital product agency will, or at least should, adapt the product to increase the overall UX while identifying bugs along the way.

Applying techniques, such as behavioural tracking, A/B testing and product benchmarking, enables the studio to enhance the product and meet the initial goals while retaining the values laid out in the initial design.

But unlike design, digital product development requires keeping things on track and attempting to improve a digital product in progress with additional features when necessary.

Some flashy new features will appear tempting but beware, they can cause “feature creep” to halter the progress and value of your product. 

When attempting to improve something, sometimes, we must remove what's unnecessary before adding whatever we think may make it better.

4. Digital product management

Critical to each aspect of design, development, and overall transformation is digital product management. After all, ensuring digital products are successful is a responsibility.

Digital product management requires balancing creativity and logic, design and development, and expectations and ambitions systematically and simultaneously.

A digital product project must be managed, delegated, and motivated towards the overarching goal, with all personnel involved having an equal understanding of what’s expected for the final result. 

Digital product agencies hire and assign digital product managers for their skills that involve strategic planning, prioritisation, research and analysis alongside rapid iteration and deployment with a sound understanding of usage data and design.

The overall aim of digital product management is to maximise the potential of the digital product from design and materialise this vision during development before launching the finished article successfully.

5. Digital product strategy

One core differentiator with Stoked is our focus on aligning product development and marketing under a digital product strategy; a foundational document outlining properties of the product that drives the longer-term success of the project, whether internal or market-facing.

All too often, we’ve seen digital projects launched with no underlying strategy, goals or even an awareness of what problem is being solved and for whom. Our proprietary product strategy service defines the product’s proposition, key metrics, target market, USPs, and competitors, something we’ve found to help longer-term success of a digital product instead of just building an app or interface and hoping for the best.

Speak to a leading digital product agency

At Stoked, we’re an innovative and impact-driven digital product agency. For us, digital products are more than software and technology. They drive high-value business results, connecting consumers with solutions and brands with innovation. ​

By providing pioneering strategies with world-class execution, we solve critical business problems - from design to development and launch before driving rapid adoption in the market through effective strategy.

So, if it’s time for your business to modernise by digitising its processes, connect with us today.