A digital product designer is analogous to an industrial designer of physical products—in that they determine the form and functionality of a product, working together with engineers. But as we will see in this blog, the skillset of a digital product designer is incredibly wide-ranging.
This places good digital product designers in high demand—and makes them very hard to hire. Many organisations do not have this capability in-house—and call upon external product design consultancies or agencies to help them.
By bringing together all the required product design skills and capabilities in one expert partner, a digital product consultancy can help your organisation deliver better digital products, faster.
A specialist product design consultancy can provide whole teams of expert designers. By working with an agency, your organisation gains access to the right design talent exactly when needed— without the challenges of finding, managing and retaining this rare resource in-house.
Even when an organisation has some in-house product design capability, it will often lack the experienced senior-level designers that can make all the difference to a project. A product design consultancy will have these senior-level professionals who can bring their valuable input to improve project delivery.
Working with an external consultancy can help open your teams up to an outside perspective on product design. This helps you challenge, rethink and improve your approach. It helps you see your products the way that users and customers will view them, so you can more accurately meet their needs.
Trained to understand what drives a business, they know how teams, workflows and systems are set up within the organisation. Most importantly, they know how to uncover the real goals of the customer or business user.
Experienced product design consultants see the potential connections between currently disparate products and services across an organisation. They act as advocates and evangelists in a business for the user-focused and customer-centric product viewpoint.
They are experts at communicating product vision and value propositions to business leadership and teams—using clear visual language, collaborative workshops and compelling business storytelling to build engagement, consensus and win product buy- in.
