East Coast Product — A Steroid Injection for your Product Development
Sometimes even the best ideas need a helping hand to reach fruition.
For clients looking to get their product from conception to development, that helping hand arrives in the form of East Coast Product, a Boston-based digital product firm aimed at providing its customers all the assistance they require to make sure they reach their goals in competitive marketplaces.
Chris Swenor, Co-founder/CEO of ECP, said the company, which officially opened for business in April 2015, initially began as a means to connect projects and developers, but quickly adapted to meet the needs of its clients.
“I realized that just connecting developers with projects wasn’t the best way to actually help these products. Product teams needed guidance and strategy,” Swenor said. “I wanted to use my product knowledge combined with quality development to actually enhance companies. Here at ECP, rather than just simply building what a client wants, we build what their customers need.”
Building what customers need has led to rapid growth for ECP. Initially starting with four employees, the company has quadrupled in size in less than a year, providing its customers with a wide array of services. Through the firm’s growth, Swenor said flexibility and attention to detail have led to success for both his business and his clients.
“We walk our customers through every step of the development cycle, from user research and strategy to design and ultimately development,” Swenor said. “We don’t just check boxes here. We work to understand our clients’ target customers and the ‘why’ behind the project to collaboratively build exceptional products. We augment our clients’ existing teams to get them to market as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
Ivan Blazevic, ECP Co-founder/CTO, said the company’s growth in experience has been of equal importance as its increase in size.
“We’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge,” he said. “We love a challenge, and those challenges have made us learn quickly and grow quickly. Due to the fact that every single member of the team has learned so much since the beginning, we are now capable of handling much more complicated projects than we were before.”
Swenor said that while every project is important at ECP, it is the especially challenging ones that drive his exceptional team to learn, adapt, and succeed where others do not.
“One of our clients, Safety Net Access, really stands out. This project required us to learn the ins and outs of networking systems and hotel Wi-Fi, so we could help build a platform that would ultimately be used by thousands of hotels internationally,” he said.
As part of ECP’s team, Carla Cornejo serves as Customer Experience Manager. Cornejo is responsible for ensuring that clients feel connected and involved in the design and development process by acting as a conduit between the customer and ECP’s developers. In that role, Cornejo lays the framework of communication for ECP’s clients to succeed.
“My role is to really help the two sides understand one another and work together efficiently,” she said. “Our work is inherently collaborative, so it’s exciting to watch clients’ products evolve so quickly and dramatically. Everyone here is willing to pitch in at a moment’s notice, from our C level folks down to apprentices.”
In addition to its development projects with clients, ECP is also a proud member of the local business community committed to improving the quality of life of Boston-area residents.
“We are especially proud of our partners who are tackling complex social issues,” Swenor said. “We’ve worked with Resilient Coders to improve coding literacy in at-risk communities, Innovation Women to increase visibility and opportunity for women in speaking engagements, and City awake to build a Boston social activism and resource calendar.”
Through challenging projects and ultimate success stories alike, Swenor said that ECP is determined to remain at the forefront of digital product design and development.
“We have a learning culture here at ECP, and we make it our business to stay up to speed and have a pulse on what’s out there,” he said. “Our goal is for ECP to continue to be the best and first choice for clients who have digital product needs.”
Blazevic said it the passion and dedication of every employee at ECP that will keep his company on the cutting edge of digital production.
“Passion is really what sets us apart — the passion we have for this job and the passion we have to make every client a success story,” he said.
