Why Kickstart?
Building software is hard and most projects fail. Once development begins, mistakes get costlier and fixes get more difficult. Product Kickstart reduces business risk with collaborative workshops and structured deliverables. Ensure your next product is a success.
Multi-Disciplinary Approach
Product
Uncover valuable insights about your customers, technology, and market. Build a strong foundation to ensure the success of your product.
Workshop & Deliverable
Goal Alignment
We prioritize goals for your product, technology, and business and make them measurable with specific targets. We also discuss non-goals — the dangerous rabbit holes you should avoid. At the end of this workshop, everyone will be on the same page about what success means.
Deliverable
Product KPIs
Get quantitative and time-boxed targets that define what success looks like for your product and your business.
Workshop
Cover Story
The cover story session is an exercise in visioning. We envision your organization’s ideal future state — one so compelling it lands your organization on the cover of a well-known publication. This leads to the creation of a 2-5 year product vision.
Deliverable
Product Roadmapping
In the product roadmapping session, our goal is to determine the priorities, interrelationships, and dependencies between epics. We also determine the overall order to build the product. The end result is a roadmap: a live document showing how the product will be delivered.
Deliverable
Competitive Analysis
Better understand your competitors and their products to gain insight into the opportunity space for your business.
Workshop
Problem Statement Canvas
Empathize with your customers by understanding the obstacles in their way and the potential consequences of them missing their goals. This will help in creating more informed solutions.
Design
Create beautiful applications grounded in customer insights. Visualize what your minimum viable product could look like and test it with real users.
Workshop & Deliverable
Customer Journey Mapping
A customer journey map visualizes how customers interact with your organization across different touchpoints. By picturing the end-to-end experience, it highlights opportunities to improve customer engagement.
Workshop & Deliverable
User Story Mapping
User story maps plot requirements in a narrative format to help you view the user experience holistically without missing key requirements. We prioritize these requirements to make better decisions about adding or cutting scope. This helps in prioritizing near-term and long-term features.
Workshop & Deliverable
Personas
Personas aggregate insights about real customers into archetypes. We use research insights and your experience working with customers to create personas. We focus less on things like demographics, and more on things like goals and pain points.
Workshop
Design Studio
In a design studio, we visually represent the product through sketching and storyboarding. We begin by creating several divergent ideas and work as a group to narrow them down to the most viable solutions. At the end of this workshop, you will have complete storyboards that show how someone uses the product to complete a task.
Workshop
Creative Matrix
Strategic, focused brainstorming. We address a specific problem statement using “enablers.” An enabler is a specific tool or technique we could incorporate into our product. You leave with a prioritized set of ideas to solve specific customer challenges.
Workshop & Deliverable
Research Planning
Design experiments to test your most important problem statement. Get a tactical plan for gathering insights from real users that you can use to plot the way forward.
Deliverable
Prototyping
We’ll craft a prototype that’s not just engaging, but also technically feasible. This gives your team a tangible idea of what your product can look like. The prototype also lets you put a version of your product in the hands of real users. This reveals what’s working and what isn’t.
See The Prototype in Action
See an example of a no-code prototype for our farmer's market app on Figma.
Engineering
Understand the technical constraints of your existing systems and receive actionable recommendations for the next phase of work: building the product.
Deliverable
Tech Ecosystem
We enumerate the discrete but interdependent relationships between components, systems, digital products, and data sources. Understanding the technical ecosystem provides a more holistic view as well as insights on leveraging new and existing assets.
Deliverable
System Architecture
In this workshop, developers work with product experts and designers to understand product and business rules that affect system design. From these requirements, we develop architectural proposals to extend existing frameworks or perform greenfield development.
Kickstart is Flexible
You don’t have to work around Kickstart, it adapts to your needs. You can jump in at any stage of the process. For example, if your team has already done user and market research, we can pick up the baton and start from the next stage.
