Scaling, the Skalar way
At Skalar we work to make people’s lives better. We do this by working with our co-creators to help their clients and customers. We do it by working on a known challenge or bottle neck, or by discovering new potential and opportunities. In this article we will explore our process from a business perspective and give context to how we work with our co-creators.
We work to always deliver more than expected. When we begin a strategic partnership the co-creator will often know a familiar pain point, one which hinders their growth and value creation. But with a wider lens we often see that the challenges might be different than the one originally posed. They might come to us looking to optimise the way their clients use a digital booking system, but in reality the pain is not there, it is the fact that the system lacks a vital integration like invoicing. Every collaboration starts with a discovery phase where we look for such blind spots together.
The test and retest of our initial hypothesis is constant — as in science nothing is proven, only disproven and shown to be most probable. Still we need to create and build, that’s what we do at Skalar. So a prototype is created to test the viability of the hypothesis, and to see what kind of technology is most suited for the needs of our co-creator. A Skalar team of experts in business, technology and design leading the way to create opportunities.
Product development is a tailored process. It might take a few weeks, it might take years, all depends on the scope. But there is always a initial phase in a case which is especially focused on novel product development. Here we create the bulk of the software and tailor it to the needs discovered in the previous phases. Here we do the holistic view, the deep detail-oriented work and streamline the initial product. This is done in constant collaboration between the Skalar team and the co-creator.
There is nothing more exciting than launching a product. Even though we have done it many times, it makes our heart pump. Once the pilot is ready, we test the product in an initial small marketplace or on a selected group of early adopters. The pilot depends on the product. Some have a soft launch, this means gradually allowing alpha and beta testing to be done on a product still in development, this means real time feedback and better user experience. Others have a hard launch, the traditional approach where a product becomes available on a specific date . Either way, it is the first public test of the product, and from that we gather feedback. The most important thing during a pilot is to find the bugs, bottlenecks and quirky functionality to quickly remove them and make the product better and more user friendly. We all remember how our most endeared digital products looked and felt initially — they have gone a long way. But still the core functionality needs to be good or we will go back to the drawing board. There is no way we can help our co-creators by having a product that doesn’t exceed their expectations.
After the product has launched to market, we adapt and fine tune it to look towards the position of marked lead. We do this by scaling strategically, always in tandem with our co-creators. After all it’s the product and businesses we create results for. In the market it is ups and downs, major and minor pivots and iterations, all to create the best product possible. The user is always the one to please, and we do this by listening to their needs, their wishes and feelings. We also need to anticipate their desires and unknown pains, so our functionality addresses that well. By repeating these processes we scale; by solving real life problems for users, increase UX so more users will benefit from and use the product or show empathy for co-creators and their business model, helping it become automated and more efficient, thus creating loyalty from their clients. We do all this with the aim of taking the “pole position” in the market. Which is always our goal on behalf of our co-creators.
