Design thinking: Digital product and service development

What does my customer need to use my product, my service, or my offer? How do I understand my customers quickly and efficiently? How do I create not only the right but the most relevant solution for my customer’s needs? We are asked these questions every day, not just yesterday, but for more than 25 years.

Sebastian Krüger, Geschäftsleitung

Reading duration: 5 minutes

At the core, the insight is always the same. The user experience determines the success or failure of a solution. But today, we seem to feel that we have significantly more challenges and less and less time to develop solutions for them. Digitalisation drives – it increases the speed at which we gain knowledge.

As part of our product and service development process, we have continuously advanced and improved our methods to ensure we can keep our knowledge, speed and success moving smoothly hand in hand together. For good reason, we have strongly expanded our customer-centric development approach in recent years and months.

Recipe for success: Consistent, goal-oriented cooperation

We can only achieve success together with our customers. Our product development approach is now consistently geared toward agility in cross-divisional teams that consist of customers and agency employees. Customers are active team members in our Design Thinking workshops. They experience and go through the dynamic and iterative innovation process – in which we are focusing on their target group. The aim of this process is to bring together different experiences and opinions of a problem into interdisciplinary teams. Through permanent feedback and iteration, we can thus drive the intended solution to product maturity with maximum speed and testing.

Experience Design Sprint with Deutsche Telekom

As preparation for the Deutsche Telekom Experience Design Sprint, the first step was to research all relevant current data, analyse the competition, carry out trend research, and collect user knowledge data. After selecting a team and the appropriate location, our five-day Experience Design Sprint focused on developing a user model. After a phase of finding ideas and identifying potential for improvement, we developed our first prototype. With the help several rounds of testing, the prototype was adapted to the customer’s wishes. In a follow-up, results data were analysed, takeaways from the project were defined, and the next goals were set.

Business Builder with merQbiz

The basis of the project was a comprehensive analysis of the company’s current processes. In the following Business Builder Week, these processes were mapped and weak points analysed. In a brainstorming session with an interdisciplinary team, the previous business model was reconsidered, and a new approach was gradually developed. Finally, the process and planning change strategies were documented, and a road map and milestones were developed. These were unveiled in a final presentation. Part of this road map was the development of a mobile solution for the core target group of merQbiz. In a joint three-day kickoff, the relevant customer journeys were identified and solutions were outlined. Logical and technical dependencies were also clarified. The UX/UI sprint started directly afterwards with the aim of producing a first clickable prototype. Only then did we start with the technical implementation of the app, which is available for iOS and Android. Through a uniform understanding of the customer problem and close cooperation, a fast first solution was developed in the sense of an MVP 1.0 (minimum viable product), which is now constantly being extended by the addition of functions and user groups.

Our products

Both in our Design Thinking Lab in Berlin and at our locations in Munich and Frankfurt, we enable our customers to implement solutions for their questions in a creative environment in joint teams. Whether it is an idea, an innovation, or a process question – we can find the right solution for every situation or challenge.

Sebastian Krüger is Managing Partner at Ray Sono and heads the Innovation Hub in Berlin. Digital mind, creative head and always looking for the newest hot sh**.

You want to learn more about Ray Sono? Get in touch!

You want to learn more about Ray Sono? Get in touch!

Nancy Forner
Marketing & Communications
Contact us here

Further stories