Engine Digital

For over two decades, the MVP approach has helped teams narrow in on the most minimal set of features, limiting effort and risk in the pursuit of validating new products and services. While this approach has led to many successes, it’s also produced a multitude of failures. What worked in the early days of software may just not work as well today. We’ve come to expect better services, more intuitive experiences, personalized, differentiated, and packaged up in smart branding and good design. We think it might be time to reframe the MVP – from Minimum Viable Product to Minimum Value Proposition – to validate new products and services by their true ability to create real, measurable customer value. Read our thoughts on Minimum Value Proposition and tell us what you think in the comments – http://eng.in/edbp052824 #MVP #ValueProposition #ProductMarketFit #Innovation #NewVentures

We’re hiring for several key roles. Open to hybrid candidates in Vancouver or remote candidates across Canada with a preference for Toronto. – Engagement Lead – Strategy Director – Design Director – Front End Engineer – QA Manager Apply here – http://eng.in/careers

With digital products and services becoming ever more integral to brand building and customer engagement, the need for greater security in protecting customer data continues to be a critical consideration. We make security an integral part of every digital product we build. Whether working with healthcare apps that must meet HIPAA standards or e-commerce platforms requiring PCI compliance, our approach ensures that security is considered from day one. In this post from Principal Engineer, James Doyle, we outline several ways to factor data security into your product strategy, to protect users, and brand reputation. http://eng.in/edbp050824 #DataSecurity #DataProtection #DigitalProduct

Adding talent to the Delivery group – we’re looking for consultative, adaptive individuals with a head for the rigors of ecom and product. If you’d like to influence business outcomes, and want to step outside traditional PM conventions, then reach out.

We're looking for a resourceful, strategic, and collaborative Senior level Digital Producer / Project Manager to join us. Vancouver-based candidates preferred, remote across Canada and the US considered. Find out more – http://eng.in/careers

One theme that comes up often in our work at Engine Digital – and something I think about a lot as CEO – is onboarding. On the surface it might sound trivial. Important maybe, but not something that needs a lot of consideration, right? But onboarding impacts our success as individuals, as teams, as businesses, and as partners. Because it’s fully within our control, why wouldn’t we do all we can to influence success? Onboarding touches nearly everything we do – as an agency we’re a people business and our work is always in service of an end user – a business leader, product team, customer, employee. So here are a few ways we think about onboarding: New team members – Joining a new team is daunting. To ensure new team members are able to contribute quickly without unnecessary stress and pressure, we’re constantly iterating our onboarding process. This includes our Buddy System – pairing new team members with teammates who can provide guidance and support in a more casual way. Project teams – Team alignment is clearly critical to success. Our teams use Project Contexting, a sort of reverse briefing, to inquire and organize project information that’s then vetted with our clients. This brings clarity and allows the team to take ownership of scope and objectives while also creating an archive to inform new team members that might join later in the process. New clients – There isn’t always a straight line to what an ideal form of engagement looks like. To get this right, often both agency and client teams need to allow for some adjustment. We’ve developed a Client Onboarding framework that guides us in finding alignment by creating the space to share each team’s ideal ways of working in support of a strong partnership. New partners – While most of our work involves partners, it’s important that we build an ecosystem of partners we like, trust, and can rely on. To avoid misalignment, we created an Ideal Partner Profile that helps us quickly vet new partners to ensure they’ll be good collaborators and that we have a shared understanding of what great work looks like. Users of the products we design – In product design, the onboarding user flow can be one of the most important, yet sometimes overlooked. It creates a first impression and helps guide users to realize the value they’re seeking. The onboarding flow is something we fully control, and just one lever that helps to validate product market fit. Clearly onboarding is ubiquitous to what we do, and refining onboarding is an iterative process. There is no end state. It’s about empathy and recognizing the need to design pathways into the systems we create. It’s about leveraging what we control to eliminate friction and set us up for success. Is onboarding a theme in your business? How are you factoring onboarding into your operations, into your partnerships, or into your product or service? #Onboarding #ProductDesign #UserExperience #ClientEngagement

Rethinking the MVP — a great perspective from Linear's co-founder, Tuomas Artman … http://eng.in/m1ul15

Well, this is pretty crazy – Engine Digital turned 22 last month. 😎

So, what is the cost of a bad user experience? According to Sonos, Inc. CEO Patrick Spence, their recently botched mobile app update just might cost the company between $20-30M. Yes, a poorly designed and poorly executed app will have a $20-30M impact on the business. It’s unclear how they’ve come to this number, but consider – beyond a loss of revenue – how the costs of releasing a deficient mobile app start to add up. Reworking the product means design, development, and (hopefully) user testing costs. Customer frustration means a spike in customer support costs. Mitigating the blowback and smoothing out a hit to brand reputation means PR costs. Winning back customers means marketing costs. All while sprinting to avoid more customer churn while the app rebuild happens – which will likely take months. What’s often unknown is the opportunity cost of settling for poorly designed digital products or services. What money are we leaving on the table by skipping continual improvement, avoiding user testing, optimization, and dare I say,... innovation? Sonos has received a significant amount of bad press for removing basic features (the ability to edit playlists and song queues, to set sleep timers) and by taking a non-user-centric approach to updating an existing mobile product – a product that is of course completely integrated with their speakers and required to use their service. I’ve had Sonos speakers for ages, and even before this update, I’ve experienced endless frustration with their app interface and frequent issues with pairing. In fact, I’ve resorted to assuming one of my Sonos speakers is a brick. The Sonos hardware UI was clearly designed around a “less is more” ethos, and yet, their digital products have historically been a mess. In this era of digitalization, it's telling when a hardware brand puts less focus on their digital products from a design and experience perspective. And yet, here we are. As Ars Technica wrote – “Sonos' expensive predicament is a cautionary tale about rushing—and forcing—changes to devices that people already own… Considering how big of an overhaul Sonos says the app redesign was, it should have been developed and tested thoroughly and completely, even if that took longer than originally planned.” We can certainly assume much of the issues with the Sonos app rollout is due to a rushed timeline, or possibly deficient QA testing, and likely both are true. But what’s buried here is the real issue – a lack of prioritizing user research, user experience planning, user testing, and optimization as a core part of the project plan. Yes, change can be welcome by users (we all love a new iOS update, right?) but change in an ecosystem with existing users, some of which may rely on our services, needs to be extremely thoughtful. When we cut corners, rush the process, or avoid putting user needs first, this right here is the outcome we should expect. #Sonos #UserTesting #UserExperience #AppDesign

Big News Day – new Strategy and Design leadership at Engine Digital! 🚀🚀🚀 We’re excited to welcome Marie Gosal into the role of Executive Design Director. Marie brings an impressive background in design leadership at Metalab and lululemon leading global design teams. She’ll focus on elevating our brand design, visual design, product design, and design systems capabilities. We’re also excited to have Laura Falconer move into the role of Executive Strategy Director. In her 3+ years at Engine, Laura has led impactful work with Blueair (Unilever), Far Niente Winery, Bravo TV (NBC Universal), and Pernod Ricard. She’ll continue to drive our research, product design, experience design, and service design capabilities. Marie and Laura will co-lead a unified Strategy and Design team from our Vancouver studio, ensuring our work remains brand-focused and insight-driven. We’re also excited to have Eugene Huh move into a Principal Strategist role where he will continue to lead our new ventures, innovation, and research engagements. Based in Toronto, Eugene’s 11+ year journey with Engine has seen him lead projects for Mastercard, Autodesk, HP, and many more. With recent client wins in financial services, bioscience, enterprise software, and gaming, we’re poised for growth in 2024 and hiring across Strategy, Design, Engineering, and Delivery. Exciting times ahead! 💼✨ More here – http://eng.in/x6z1sv #DesignLeadership #StrategyLeadership #DigitalAgency