Over the past 4 years, my consultancy, Propeller, has had the amazing opportunity to work with innovative companies, large and small, who share the same passion for building quality digital products. I started Propeller because I wanted to create meaningful digital experiences that were core to the value proposition of our clients’ companies. With so many apps launching each day, it’s easy to feel as though most digital products come off an assembly line and can be created, or discarded, whenever.

At Propeller, we not only refuse to build products that way, or with that intention, but we also avoid clients who do not demonstrate the desire to build a product that has a true purpose and implicit value for their customer. Those clients want to breeze through strategy, rush through design, and find the cheapest engineering possible — that’s not how we roll. For that reason, most of our clients run very successful businesses and continue to grow and succeed in their areas of expertise. In some cases, we work with startups that are acquired. We’ve experienced that three times now. First was Cruise, then HeartThis, and most recently Worklife. They were acquired by General Motors, Thumbtack, and Cisco respectively. And now we like to double-dip and say we built an app for GM’s self-driving cars. 😉

Building products with these fantastic companies was a rewarding experience for our team as well. Understanding their value proposition, and believing in it, enabled our team to get behind the vision of each and work with the passion of an empowered teammate. Each sought us out to create solutions as their partner: Cruise needed an iOS companion app to their driving system that presented real-time info in a non-distracting fashion, HeartThis needed to create a native mobile application for their proprietary shopping experience, and Worklife needed help creating a product that would aid their mission of making work more efficient and more successful.

As we moved through strategy, design, and engineering with each partner, we noticed a consistent theme: the uncompromising necessity of a product owner. For a second let’s ignore the relevance of titles. Sure, typically a product manager is the product owner, but that’s not always the case. Regardless of the title, it’s important that an organization knows who is responsible and held accountable for bringing the product to life, so they can then hold others accountable as well, for the quality of said product. In these cases we had Dan, Jen, and Val. These amazing people were our go-to counterparts when making crucial strategy, design, and development decisions. There were three common themes we saw across these product owners:

Product owners understand the design process. In each of the above examples, they were fully aware of how an application’s UI and UX can make or break the product. Not only that, but these product owners had tangible reference points of good design taken from current examples that already exist. This does not mean they analyze competitors’ solutions and just mimic all of their features instead of innovating on their own. If you do that, you’re already behind. What they do instead is recognize different elements of good design (from multiple sources) that resonate well with users. They use those references to spur the brainstorming process and then figure out how to improve upon those design principles for their own products. Product owners leverage time effectively. Although in most cases they may be more design-oriented and technologically-inclined than your average layperson, product owners don’t claim to be able to do it all on their own. The best ones give creative professionals room to roam freely with the guided direction of those reference points we talked about earlier. They don’t pitch a tent and camp out with binoculars to watch our every move. Each product owner allowed our design and development teams the space and freedom to do what they do best. Our contacts at these three companies trusted us to get the work done, and in an agile fashion, we checked in regularly to ensure the work aligned with the product requirements and overall objectives. In effect, the product owners drove down the time for these processes while ensuring that their product benefits showed through accurately at each stage along the way. This somewhat “hands off” approach facilitated the perfect balance of collaboration as equal partners working successfully towards unified goals. Product owners sweat the small stuff. It might sound counter-intuitive and exhausting, but you should sweat the little things. Countless minuscule details come together to form a unique product identity. Charles Eames said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Cruise, HeartThis, and Worklife worked this way, and it showed. Their great attention to detail in creating their products brought them success. Some specific examples of this:

When we worked with Cruise, we fixated on dashboard animations to feel exact. Pulse animations acted as positioning and active indication. The transition between dark and red screens presented states for system engaged and disengaged. These small design affordances kept our users aware of changes to application states without begging for attention. For driving, the best UI is a design that sits in the background.

With the HeartThis mobile application, one of the aspects we focused most heavily on was the details surrounding the onboarding process. It was vital that users interacting with HeartThis could easily figure out how to use the app immediately after install. We worked with Jen to make the app understand where people entered, what they had interacted with, and present the functionality we wanted them to interact with using contextual tooltips. Jen’s constant goal was to make the app feel like a shopping platform that reinvented the way people shop online, not just a deal aggregation tool.

With Worklife, we remodeled their brand, logo, and meeting application to better reflect their new direction. A large part of that included choosing new color themes. Reiterating color palettes ever so slightly is a small detail that makes a huge difference in how functional color is perceived.

Great products, as with great companies, are a result of different groups coming together to achieve an ultimate objective. No one lives in a vacuum, and a collaborative approach is imperative in the creation of quality digital products. The product owners ensure each party brings their best to the table. We are grateful for the opportunity to work with Cruise, HeartThis, and Worklife. Those experiences helped us grow as an agency and learn how we can best support the product owners in bringing successful products to life.

George is the CEO of Propeller, a consultancy focused on strategy, design, and development for custom digital products. Drop us a line if you have a web, mobile, or VR app you need help bringing to life.

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