Product Teamwork, Product Development, & the Product Creation Lifecycle

What does it take to build a product development team that provides real value to a client? And what are the most important considerations for each discipline – engineering, product, user experience – to spend their effort on in a way that will help both their team members and the client?

3Pillar Global’s Oana Mihail spoke about those topics at Product Matters, a product-development focused event that was held on September 7^th in Iași, Romania as part of the opening of 3Pillar’s new office there.

In the presentation, Oana talks about why it’s important to continually foster a relationship with both stakeholders and users in taking a user-centered approach to product development. Further, she provides a high-level overview of the steps in the product creation lifecycle. The steps Oana lays out are:

1. Understanding and research. The goal here is to gain a deep understanding of a product’s users. Typically this is done by observing people using an app or product in real time and with user interviews.
2. Defining the issue. In this step, the team is focused on synthesizing all the information gleaned during the understanding and research phase and coming up with a concrete problem the user has that they can solve for.
3. Ideation.Once an issue is defined, we go into the idea generation phase, placing an emphasis on quantity over quality.
4. Prototyping.This is the phase of the product development process where we start to breathe life into it for the first time. As Oana says in her talk, “…this step also leads to discoveries and innovations because we see the product from the inside. We see the features, we see the flows with that architecture now…and it’s a way to explore our ideas from the ideation stage.”
5. Testing.Once a prototype is created, it’s time to test it out with some of the audience for which it was created. This is another key phase where unexpected innovations and discoveries often occur.

About Oana Mihail

Oana is a User Experience Designer and full-time creative thinker at 3Pillar Global, where she is focused on visual and interaction design. In the last five years of her career, she had the privilege to work with exceptional clients from areas such as media, services, and commerce. Her constant curiosity of how colors influence core human emotions was the starting point of her career as a graphic designer. To this day, color theory is one of her favorites tools she uses from her awesome toolbox of skills.

About Product Matters

“Product Matters” was the first 3Pillar tech event in Iași, Romania, and it coincided with our office opening in Iași. Product Matters saw a number of talks from 3Pillar executives and product leaders on recent technology trends, learning the Product Mindset, and understanding how teams can work together to compete and win in the digital economy.