This presentation was made at the tech clinic of the Accelerator Academy, a business accelerator programme for high-growth companies with web and mobile products. It describes the things we have learned over he years at Imaginary Cloud, a design and development agency, about delivering great web and mobile apps, as well as running our own team which consistently delivers outstanding results for our clients.

1. PRODUCT CREATION
ESSENTIALS
by Imaginary Cloud
Grow your company as big as your
dreams with a market leading product
@imaginary_cloud
!

2. Step back
!
Why did you start your company?

3. Your Aspirations
I am assuming that you want to create a product that:
✦ Users love to spend time with
✦ Attracts your target audience with the least effort possible
✦ Takes you as little time and money as possible to get right
✦ Is easy to implement, and also future proof
✦ Enables your company to grow as big as your dreams
!
…are we on the same page?
!
!

4. How does your product help you meet
those aspirations?
The answer should be obvious.
Examples where product leads the industry
✦ Tesla motors
✦ Xero in cloud accounting
✦ New York City - Michael Bloomberg commissioned Janette
Sadiq-Khan to redesign the city
✦ Google’s Android division is now design driven by Matias
Duarte (went from quantitative to envisioned
✦ and of course: Apple
!
!

5. My personal experience and why I’m
here to talk to you today
Through my eyes (Olga
Pavlovsky, @lplatebigcheese)
!
Observed the creation of
some of the first computer
games: all about the quality
!
Assisted: sale of companies
with great products.
!
Scaling of companies with no
additional resource through
the right back office setup.
Key lessons
✦ Design is key
✦ Development is key
✦ Culture is key
✦ Project Management must
fit the culture
!
Vital lesson
✦ Always going back to basics,
never moving forward
before a current problem is
resolved

6. The three basic model to live by (and survive)

7. 1. The three layers of effort
You have many options for who you can choose to design and
implement your product: an in-house team, an agency, or freelancers
to name just a few.
What is a must for you to see a successful outcome, is addressing the
following three layers of work to the highest possible standard, at each
stage of the process.
!BUSINESS STRATEGY
!PRODUCT IMPLEMENTATION
!TECHNICAL STRATEGY

8. The Common Problem
Unless you have your very own CTO and experienced Product
Designer, experienced in launching a brand new product in your
sector, you will be missing the middle layer.
The common reality is that this usually leads to the delivery of a
product that does not match your business strategy.
!BUSINESS STRATEGY
!PRODUCT IMPLEMENTATION
!NOTHING

9. COMMITMENT DESIGN BUILD GROW
!
IDEA
At Imaginary Cloud, we believe that the process of product creation has 5 key steps
Completing each of these steps in the right order provides the greatest chance of your
product being a success: high quality, on time and on budget.
2. The five-step product creation process

10. 3. The three infrastructure options
Products: Wordpress, Shopify
Frameworks: Ruby on Rails or .net
Languages: Ruby, PHP, C++, Objective C
Speed
&
Constraint

11. Using these models
Always, always start with the why
Why
Vision
Mission
Delivery
!
!
1. Who = 3 layers of effort
2. When, where = five step product creation process
3. What = three infrastructure options

12. The Product Design Process work plan
Process stage Work format
1. Benchmark Pre-workshop research by design team
2. Personas
Discovery workshop
Follow-on implementation
3. Moodboard
Discovery workshop
Follow-on implementation
4. User journeys
Discovery workshop
Follow-on implementation
5. Graphic design Follow-on implementation
Our Product Design Process is a 5-step journey to transform your idea into a
tangible project plan with prioritised, precise requirements.
The following steps will leave you confident that the time and funding you
commit to creating your product is assigned to the right activities:
For the rest of this presentation
1. Recruiting your team
2. Managing your team
3. When does outsourcing make sense?
4. How do you outsource successfully?
5. Managing projects and quality successfully
6. Planning for the future
7. Web & mobile development: key differences
8. Innovating and staying ahead
9. The subjects you asked to be covered

13. 1. Recruiting your team
To become a market leader you must recruit only the
best
!

14. Guess what… it’s back to the why and our three models
!
1. Why do you need them?
2. Who do you need?
3. When and where do you need them?
4. What do you need them to do?
5. How will you manage them?
!
Make these decisions really well.
And note - not everyone needs to be an employee, you need
to be de-risking, especially on non-core staff.

15. Where do find them?
!
1. Your product
2. Your people
3. Your pitch
4. Your presence
5. Your people’s presence
6. Your website - the best impression?
7. Your offering
8. Your promotion: events, ads, job fairs
9. Your connections with universities and colleges

16. Goal
Find the very best people who fit your:
✦ business strategy requirements
✦ cultural values
✦ work ethic and quality expectations
Method: conduct three interviews
✦ business strategy requirements: first stage interview covers all
the basic knowledge needed, at base level
!
✦ cultural values: second stage interview covers motivations and
questions about how issues/problems approached
!
✦ work ethic and quality expectations: practical challenge, in
person to evaluate the work style, approach, standard and
interpersonal skills
Interviews

17. 2. Managing your team
How do you get the best from each other?

18. Build and grow the people, not just the team
Goal
✦ Develop your people and achieve your goals through their growth
!
Method
Align your own goals with your people’s goals and development
✦ Envisage your path
✦ Evaluate the skills and expertise you need to get to these goals
✦ Understand your available choices and constraints
✦ Understand the deep motivations your applicants and team members
✦ Select your people according to those goals
✦ Always ensure their goals align with yours
✦ Grow your people according to your goals and their goals
✦ Remember, never, ever move on until you solve a current problem or
concern. You’re responsible for people’s futures
✦ Promote and manage creativity
✦ Make only one person accountable for any one thing
✦ Never have double reporting It’s bad. Always
You must delve into the deep human drivers to fully understand people
The risk: you create unhappy families by not having a nice environment

19. Materials and logistics matter
Goal
✦ Use what’s available to you to improve trust, engagement, performance and
loyalty
!
Method
Find what your team values and make ways to make those things happen. Our
experience:
✦ Make sure people have the right tools for the job before they have an issue
✦ People treasure a Mac much more than a [insert other brand here]
✦ A nice office makes better people, better work
✦ Go out to lunch, drinks and dinner with your team (sometimes)
✦ Pay - your choice, but ideally just above market average
✦ A regular meeting where everyone gets together and shares stories is a great
team builder
✦ Financing a phone contract is tax efficient for everyone (but not everyone
wants it)
✦ KITTENS!
Meet people’s deepest human drivers using the things having a company
allows you to do. Don’t be greedy - you’re in it together.

20. 3 & 4 Outsourcing
Works great when you apply our favourite models

21. When should you outsource?
Goal
Remember that any choice you make is a trade-off
Establish when it really is better to take an activity out of your in-
house team’s plan to further the business
!
Method
✦ Review your roadmap - what do you need to achieve and when?
✦ If you don’t have the in-house expertise and quality is critical: an
expert external company can help
✦ Go back to the three models and understand the who, when, where,
what
✦ Look at your team, understand what you can bring, and what the
external company must bring
✦ Ask yourself a huge range of “what if” questions about what would
happen in the in-house vs external company environment
✦ Only outsource when you have done this, otherwise you’re not
ready (an honest company will tell you when you’re ready, but not
all will be able to educate you)
!

22. How will an outsourcing company see you?
Goal
See the world through your partner’s eyes and understand what
drives them
!
Method
You must get in the head of the company and understand why it is
hey want you as a client
✦ Understand why the company was set up - are the founders aligned
with your own view of business and the world?
✦ Understand you must have RAM (requirements, authorisation,
money) to run a successful project
✦ Understand that if you don’t have RAM, some people will still try
and sell you time. Be prepared to run
✦ Understand that if it seems too cheap to be true… it usually is
✦ Understand that every cost saved, or research not done is made up
in time you make up
✦ Remember: any work they do for free is not going to be the best in
class (and this includes proposals, especially complex ones)
!

23. How to judge the quality of an outsourcing
company
Goal
Understand if, in reality, working with the company will be a dream or a
nightmare
!
Method: you must find all of the following things out
✦ Are their people good enough for your standard? Ask for CVs
✦ Is the reputation up to scratch? Ask for reference
✦ Is the quality of output OK? Look at past work, ratings of apps on the App
Store
✦ Do they have empathy? Do they listen to you, or just do what they want to?
✦ Are their principles aligned with yours?
✦ Does their business model fit yours?
✦ Do you manage projects in the same way?
✦ Is the relationship cache or equity?
✦ Is their reporting transparent?
✦ Do they give you full IPR?
✦ Critically: do they give you real answers that make sense, or do they claim
computer science is a voodoo art?
!
!

24. How to manage the output of an
outsourcing company
Goal
Manage the relationship to minimise risk and maximise results
!
Method
✦ Check the alignment of the team at each step of the project
✦ Go back to your review of the roadmap and think about all the
things that can go wrong
✦ Ensure the team you get is the one that stays with the project
✦ When you see things going wrong, raise them up the food chain tip
they get resolved
!
Working cycles
✦ Set daily stand up meetings
✦ Demand weekly or fortnightly deployment
✦ Set regular product review meetings
✦ Ensure transparent reporting is in place

25. 5. Managing projects successfully
Why fail when you don’t have to?

26. Before you begin a project
Goal
Ensure you plan for success
!
Method
✦ Go back to the three models
✦ Identify any gaps
✦ Set SMART metrics (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant,
timely) and ensure everyone lives by them
✦ Brainstorm contingency plans before kick-off
✦ Plan: Waterfall for the overall plan
✦ Do: Agile/Scrum implementation with regular iterations
✦ DESIGN FIRST, CODE LAST
!
Best practices
✦ Native code
✦ Test Driven Development
✦ Regular deployment and review
✦ Pair programming

27. Common reasons for project failure
Goal
Have some simple checks to alert you to major issues
!
Method
A very short list of structural choices that usually led to
failure, check against it whenever you are planning:
✦ Wrong team structure
✦ Wrong skill set for the job
✦ Poor relationship between the team members
✦ Un-aligned interests (i.e. equity)
✦ Wrong speed chosen for the work
✦ Unhelpful reporting
✦ Incapable team (who told you they could build you the
world and delivered you rubbish)
!
!

28. During the project
Goal
Ensure you plan is actioned in the time, quality and cost you
would like to achieve
!
Method
✦ Ensure everyone knows what success and quality looks like;
align expectations
✦ Link requirements to the code
✦ Document the code
✦ Ensure reporting channels are clear and information does
not get dispersed
✦ Ensure you make time to regularly review the overall
project: outputs, quality, schedule, costs
✦ Put the product in front of users as soon as possible
✦ Trust your intuition - pick up on any uncomfortable feelings
as soon as they arise
!

29. Ensuring quality
Goal
Ensure the end result matches your quality expectations
!
Method
The quality of the project should be covered by the SMART
metrics. For example:
✦ Test coverage must be 40%
✦ Key functions must be a maximum of 3-clicks away for
users
✦ Budget must not exceed 120% of the initial estimate
!
You must be consistent with the review and analysis of these
metrics to ensure the team knows this is their mantra.
!
!

30. 6. Planning for the future
What can you do now to help you later?

31. Goal
To have a mindset of doing things now to not constrain yourself later
!
Three things that you can and should do:
✦ Architect the system with people who know what they’re doing
✦ Use frameworks or products with high update and an active ecosystem
✦ Sacrifice some data coherence if it’s possible by using NoSQL databases,
but this is not always possible
!
Ideally you really need to learn from someone who has done it all before,
there’s no way you can envisage as many possible future issues as they can
!
This is really worth paying for, just like a business adviser, especially if
100% of your revenue is to come from web or mobile channels
Planning for the future

32. 7 & 8 Platforms and innovation
Choices and adaptation

33. Web and mobile: key differences
Web
✦ High scale
✦ No memory constraints
✦ Variable user journeys
!
Mobile
✦ Low scale: all on device
✦ All about memory constraint
✦ Pre-set user journeys
!
Ensuring you build something relevant and stable
✦ Talk to someone who knows about the platform you have in
mind
✦ Use a designer who is familiar with the platform and has
proven success
✦ For both web and mobile, there are many, many
frameworks, libraries, products, templates and tools that
will save you time
✦ But of course all of these are trade offs

34. Staying ahead - philosophy
What is innovation?
✦ innovation is usually gradual, especially in the business sense
✦ people more slowly and you need to be able to sell what they
understand
✦ what wold happen if you said: “I’m going to launch a flying car in the UK
tomorrow”
✦ it is usually an incremental change in the way one aspect of a process
works.
✦ example: what is the real innovation of Twitter from previous social
networks? The non-bilateral follow. That is all. And it’s a complete game
changer.
✦ where is the actual money in innovation? Is it the idea, or the
implementation?
!

35. Staying ahead - activity
Learn from your users
✦ Find ways to learn about your users’ changing needs
✦ Review product data (i.e. which devices are people using?)
✦ Create a process for evaluating new features based on those needs
✦ Evolve with your users and always communicate with them about it
!
Learn from yourself and your team
✦ Schedule to read tech and industry press
✦ Schedule time to read books
✦ Schedule time to review operating system changes
✦ Recommend to capture using Slack
✦ Create a process to review all the information and take action if
appropriate
!
It’s not hard, it just needs time and focus
!
!

36. The other subjects you asked to be
covered

37. User Experience for Developers
What this can mean
✦ Simplicity
✦ Speed
✦ Look
✦ Feel
!
Achieving products with great user experience requires:
✦ Understanding what your users want (Product Design Process)
✦ Collecting and analysing meaningful data
✦ Giving people time to actually focus on improving UX - Pareto principle
where 80% of the time is spend on 20% of the final result, but
potentially the most critical, especially when traffic is high
✦ Getting the right people in the team to ask each other questions at the
right time
✦ Skill set for developers and designers is very different, don’t expect one
to replace the other fully, but understanding the other view is essential

38. Mobile app development
Why create a mobile app?
✦ You can be with your users all the time
✦ You can do more than just email marketing campaigns: push
notifications, real time alerts which the users sign up to themselves
!
!
How to know you need a mobile app to grow your product and company
✦ If you fully understand the value proposition that matters to your target
users (see the Product Design Process), you’ll know if a mobile solution
is right for them
✦ If you have an existing website, observe your users’ behaviour: what
devices are they using, what tasks are they doing most often? The
answers to those questions are a starting point for your application’s
requirements
✦ To decide whether you need a “native” app or HTML5, just understand if
any offline functionality is needed. If not, HTML5 is usually fine.

39. Innovation in mobile
Always be on the look out for changes in operating systems
✦ These can be a game changer, especially on mobile and create entire
new markets
✦ Example: when Apple released iOS 6, the updates to the operating
system meant that GPS was always on, meaning any app you were
running could always “know” your location
✦ This improved the features of existing applications and led to the
launch of many new ones which were able to use this change
!
Keep a look out for what’s changing in mobile hardware and software.
With the huge number of mobile users around the world and, hence, a
great route to market, even the smallest change can make a huge
difference to what you can offer your users.

40. Performance optimisation
Several angles:
✦ User experience
✦ Actual design (i.e. branding, mood board)
✦ Servers
✦ Code efficiency
!
All require effort, focus and time. Ideally, you should be spending
significant time here in the “grow” phase since optimisation is mainly
based on addressing issues that you have measured and want to improve.
i.e. you can’t fully understand the user experience your users are having
before you have any users.

41. imaginarycloud.com
info@imaginarycloud.com
+351 218 053 896
Lisboa, Portugal
!
+44 (0)7739 307 238
London, United Kingdom
COMMITMENT DESIGN BUILD GROW
!
IDEA