Hey there, if you don't want to read the full article, I'll make a very brief and concise summary for you. A digital product agency is your partner in the creation of digital products, an ally that helps you meet your technological needs.

Now, let's go with the complete explanation. A digital product agency designs and builds - you will forgive the repetition - digital products for organizations. They provide full guidance from product discovery to launch, strive for innovation in your company, and help you figure out which is the best way to add value to your business and users.

Typically digital product agencies are made up of multidisciplinary teams that collaborate to bring products to life. Product teams are generally made up of some (or all) of these roles: product managers, UX/UI designers, software developers, QA engineers, coaches, product strategists, marketing experts, AI specialists, agile leaders, etc. The team works together to create the right product in the best possible way. Digital product experts will help you plan a roadmap and create a scalable solution, usually working under agile methodologies.

Who Should Onboard a Digital Product Agency?

It doesn't matter if you have a start-up or if you're a fortune-500; a digital product agency will contribute to pursuing digital transformation in your company. The agency can work together with your tech department or even function as the tech department itself if the company doesn't have one. It can either work to improve your organization as a whole with tech or participate only in a specific project; or even incorporate into your team a particular skill you don't have in-house.

What's a Digital Product Anyway?

A digital product is any software-powered product that adds some kind of value to users. They don't have a physical form; you access them through electronic devices, such as computers, smartphones, tablets, consoles, etc. To keep it simple: Tinder, Amazon, your company's CRM, Youtube, your Bank's app and website, your University's site, LinkedIn, your Startup's website made with Wix for 15 dollars; all of them are digital products. It's important to mention that digital product agencies like Light-it center on building robust and challenging software solutions.

Digital products, just as traditional products, solve people's problems... the difference is that digital products take that to another level. The type of value digital products add can vary, and there are as many business strategies as companies worldwide. If you want to bring digital transformation into your company, it's essential first to understand your users' problems and what sort of value you'll be adding. The right way to figure all this out might be by partnering up with a digital product agency, whose expertise is in discovering and creating innovative solutions.

Digital Product Agency as Opposed to Software Factory

You probably heard the general term "Software Factory," commonly used to describe companies that deliver software products. At Light-it, we do deliver software products, but we don't relate to the term; we identify ourselves as a digital product agency.

Why? Let's go back to school and remember the nature of a factory. We all studied Henry Ford's manufacturing methods at school, which were pretty innovative for the 20th century, but sound absurd when translating them to the 2021's software industry's mindset. Ford's methodology focused on having workers doing standardized and repetitive tasks in an assembly line. The golden key of the modus operandi was that workers didn't have to think to be productive; they just had to follow an infallible guide. Efficiency was measured by the number of products created  (totally opposed to efficiency in software, where most of the time, fewer lines of code means better performance).

Trust me; a software engineering company shouldn't look anything like that.

The truth is, creating the right software product is anything but plain, and it definitely can't be done without creativity, knowledge, and research. There isn't an infallible guide on building digital products that guarantee success, because all products have different users, and all users have different needs.

That's why, in Digital Product Agencies, instead of having people working on autopilot, without questioning what they're doing, we engage the whole team with the product they're building, its users, and goals.

The process and tools are adapted for each project; that's why we use agile methodologies. There isn't, for example, one universal programming language or framework that fits every project; the team has to dive deep into the project to understand its needs.

We work on multidisciplinary teams because it's thanks to this synergy and open-mindedness that we can determine how to make the product thrive... Because a product with excellent code quality is worth nothing if it doesn't solve users' problems successfully, and to do this, we need to focus on features, UX/UI, business model, strategy, and more.

To sum up, in digital product agencies we strongly believe that involving everyone in the product's purpose has a huge impact in results. Time-after-time and project-after-project we keep confirming this is the right path.