AURA Deep dive

This piece is a continuation of 'What is AURA'. We would love for you to go through that before continuing further

What constitutes AURA

Our People & their AI assistants

We are a bunch of people who stick together and we love working with each other. Over the last 15 years we have built a culture of trust, transparency, going all out for each other and owning every client project as our own.

Our collective learnings in Design and Engineering is now being poured into AI assistants that are helping us accelerate work. We mix uniquely for each work to get the right blend of human thinking and machine's differential intelligence

Our Process

Design Led Product Engineering Process. Whether its a new product from idea to market, or a large mature product adding a new feather to its wing, we follow this process to increase it's probability of long term success tremendously:

This process runs products through four phases, each with a design centric mindset. These four phases are: Discovery, Prototype, Productionize and Go-To-Market

To understand what AURA is and how it really works, let us run you through each of these 4 phases in detail and how our people and their AI assistants, fill up the process to make it happen . "A shoe is just a shoe until Michael-Jordan steps into it :)"

Phase 1: Discovery

What really helps products succeed? It really boils down to just two things: (a) Clarity and (b) Passion.

If you truly understand WHAT needs to be built, and WHY it needs to be built, AND, if you have a bunch of people who believe in this WHAT and WHY, you are 90% sure to succeed. Simple? Well, our experience says no

Many companies that come to us hesitate to spend more time in discovering the product. They want us to jump in, give designs, quickly build prototypes. While it works in some cases, many a times, we have seen these products go out there, make some noise and eventually not reach their potential. We spend a lot of time educating them and even insist on a separate SoW for discovery. It demands that attention

The outcome of this phase is a Divami's own templated product spec that our teams are trained to act upon. This spec is not too verbose (except where it needs to be). It instead relies on a lot of diagrams, flow charts, swim lanes, concept boards, mind maps and so on..to capture the points.

Phase 2: Prototyping

Once it is clear WHAT it build and WHY, it's important to pay attention to the HOW. We love building our products first mile heavy. What we mean by this is that we want to crack the hardest puzzles upfront.

• Figure out all the R&D items and unknown integrations and dependencies, first

• Crack the brand character, values and design system and get all the stakeholders to agree, first

• Figure out the most difficult user experiences that are core to how the product will shape up, first

Phase 3: Productionize

WHAT, WHY and HOW are out of the way. Now its just execution. This should be easy? With agile and several tried and tested workflows, it should be a very predicable phase? Yes, for most part, but this is also where life happens!

Software development life cycle, no matter traversed thousands of times, never ceases to surprise again. It is as if the rules of the sport never change but every match is different.

Here is where we have seen that clarity and passion play a big role along with tight project management, definitive sprint planning and so on. We follow the practice of advance release notes for every sprint and trying to meet the promise.

To ensure that critical path development does not slip, we try to load up our sprint planning with hard tasks and soft targets. Hard tasks are ones that must surely be accomplished and soft tasks are okay to stretch beyond a sprint. This allows us to aim ambitiously and yet promise judiciously.

Phase 4: Go To Market

The proof, well, is always in the pudding. Real customers, their success, their loyalty, that's what really matters.

When we work with product and technical people, they are focused on getting the product out. And it's true. But the planning almost always stops until we roll out.

At Divami, we think that our sprints donot stop after roll out. We want to continue having sprints with the marketing teams, the sales teams, the growth teams. We align ourselves technically and design-wise to every go to market activity that is happening in the company

Design Led

Design is a term that carries several meanings. However in the world of AURA, design means the emotion and experience that is leaves the user with. And that is not just how the product screens look and navigate. There is an unsaid, underlying strategy on how you want the product to express value and meaning. That is design

Across all the four phases, our design strategist is involved. This person along with the product owner, leads and individual contributors, constantly keep an eye on how the product is shaping up from a 'user's' point of view. This unique vantage point is often missed out because the rest of the team is consumed in getting the product out.

Here are some of the activities across phases that make our process design led in its core:

Discovery

User research is conducted by UX designers who are trained in these subjects. We lay emphasis on decent sample sizes to get the 'summed up' viewpoint, but at the same time, we do not dismiss deep pain or deep delight anecdotes shared by single users. Together the findings help shape the product's 'WHAT' and 'WHY'.

Our researches then work with the Product Owner to transform into insights, and ultimately summarized recommendations. We call this the discovery presentation.

Prototyping

Core revenue UX flows are cracked upfront. This addresses the main 'elephant in the room' and settles down nerves for clients, leads and other stakeholders. By laying down the main approach for the 'core 20% of the product', the rest becomes an organic progression. We insist the team and our clients to be patient and not jump the gun here. Come up with several options and A/B tested whenever it is unclear what path to take.

Similarly the UI team applies its science to come up with the right styling. The styling must represent the brand value, character and also sync with the company's or the founder's personality. We see a lot of iterations happen here but for a very good reason. You get one chance to strike an impression with your branding and getting it right is key.

Productionize

The way engineering and design teams work at Divami is different. Perhaps because we have started our journey as a design firm and later expanded to included end to end product engineering, we are comfortable with this method

First, a UX designer lays down the experience. This single step involves a detailed 8 step process feeding off the product spec created during discovery. The output are rich wireframes with each key interaction annotated with the thought process and user experience that is being aimed for.

These enriched wireframes become an input for the UI designer who then brings out the brand's presentation without disturbing the hierarchy or priority of information.

Here is where something unique happens. The tech lead along with the product owner work on top of these UI screens to define developer notes. These notes are detailed writeups on how the design is going to behave, how is it going to come to life. For e.g. where does a field get its value, or what other dependencies does this data edit cause etc. are outlined in these discussions on the design itself.

Once the tech lead and product owner are satisfied, they bring in the architect to come up with the system design, tech architecture, DB design, functional flows and API signatures.

Right from discovery through prototyping to productionize phase, the strategic intent behind every design element is carried forward carefully thus exposing engineers, not just to the functional aspect, but also the emotional aspect of the design and it's macro context.

Go to market

As we discussed at the very beginning of 'What is AURA". we are in the era of imagination. Capturing user's attention, making a promise, and living up to that across every brand moment is going to be extremely crucial for tech products

Until recently, we never concerned ourselves with this phase since this is generally where outsourcing work of tech products typically ends. However after delivering this baby to the market, our team is left with extremely rich insights about what the product is and how it should be presented to the world

Our design strategist offers to conduct sessions to the sales and marketing teams. Right from campaign creatives to customer support response templates and tones, we want to play the role of a central advisor/approver. This is to help the brand keep the design cohesive across every touchpoint.

As and when required, we work with founders or business heads to help them develop material for investors or other key stakeholders

And finally, we keep a keen eye on product analytics and design behavior as users start interacting. We validate our design choices here with real data and make changes to optimize the funnel towards revenue

We hope you are liking what you are reading. If you are working on a great product, we would love to collaborate. You may also want to check out about 'AURA assistants'. our AI based friends that help Divamians all through this process