News & Views

How to Build Products Customers Love

There are endless ways to build products that customers love. It is easy to believe that extraordinary individuals design great products using keen insight into customers. However, this opinion is not supported by the success of companies like AirBnB, Ring, and Uber. The founders of these companies spent years refining products to meet the needs and desires of fickle customers. Many believe the myths and rely on "unicorns" to create successful products.

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• Insights

Grow Fast or Die Slow: The 4 Major Shifts in Product Development

I think what’s interesting about the old school, traditional waterfall approach of multi-year big bang product delivery cycles isn’t that it’s necessarily a wrong way to develop products.

It’s just that startups, and now smarter enterprises, are deploying products faster and refining them years before some major companies even get their products to market.

By that time, it’s too late.

And now companies are left with two choices.

Either you grow fast, or you die slow.

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How the Best Companies Design Experiences to Destroy Competition

What’s happened in the last few years is pretty clear: It’s no longer a competitive advantage to just build a better product.

You have two options to compete in 2018:

1. Build something truly remarkable that is also the first of its kind. *(e.g. Soylent didn’t build a better tasting shake. They built something that replaced your entire breakfast + coffee in a bottle.)*

2. Design an experience that adds value to your core product.* (e.g. Amazon’s $1B acquisition of Ring which allows Amazon to deliver packages inside your home, or Google’s acquisition of Nest which allows them to sell usage data to electric companies.)*

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How Traditional Wealth Management Companies Can Build Predictable Growth Through Digital Strategy and Innovation

Many wealth management firms are finding it difficult to increase their client base and consistently drive revenue in light of newer digital entrants.

The past several years have seen an influx of relationships per advisor, however those increases don’t translate to additional new clients coming on board.

In fact, advisors, overall, have added fewer new clients in the last several years.

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Why Most Digital Strategies Fail: Five Mistakes and Recommendations on How to Fix Them

If you ask a Chief Digital Officer what their role responsibilities are, they will tell you it has almost nothing to do with digital, and they don’t think their title represents their role.

The reality is that digital transformation is a catch-all term, and digital is a pathway to the real goal: transformation.

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• Insights

How Traditional Hardware Manufacturers Can Build New Revenue Streams With Connected Products

There are three ways traditional hardware manufacturers can make additional revenue by connecting their products.

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• Insights

Why You Should Embrace Product-Led Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a catch-all phrase. It could mean a million different things. It could mean moving a company to the cloud. It could mean creating mobile products for your critical applications. It could also mean a marketing strategy.

All I know is that digital transformation is the most difficult and urgent challenge for every leader in business today. I can show you a nice graphic about how CEOs and CIOs are worried about digital transformation, but it’s safe to say that you understand the challenge well.

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• Development

Vokal Takeaways from KotlinConf 2017

There's a lot of excitement lately in the developer community over Kotlin, and for good reason. Many talented programmers strongly believe that it’s time to jump ship from the Java barge and hop aboard the first bus to Kotlintown.

Excitement for Kotlin in our office has never been higher than in November when the Android engineering team packed our bags and headed out west to San Francisco to catch KotlinConf, the first conference dedicated to the language.

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• Design
• Insights

A Few Notes on Content Strategy

Creating products, completing redesigns, and implementing new features is an amazing process to be a part of. While the process of building something new may vary greatly from revamping an existing product, there are consistencies when it comes to the issue of content. With products already in the market, we encounter legacy content that hasn’t been touched in years. We also see content that was created prior to establishing a foundational strategy. Setting an initial focus on prioritizing content and copy can help alleviate future pain points during the product development process. Let’s explore some of the reasons why.

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• iOS
• Hack Days
• Development

Augmented Reality - Much More Than a Gimmick

Perhaps the most significant announcement from the 2017 WWDC was Apple's new Augmented Reality framework, ARKit. New to iOS 11, ARKit allows you to easily create augmented reality experiences for the iPhone and iPad. It takes app experiences beyond the screen, allowing people to interact with the real world in entirely new ways.

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