How we refined company course to bring more value to customers

No business stays the same throughout its lifetime. Market conditions and technology change in time, team’s experience grows, new opportunities emerge. Also, the demand of our market changes constantly, giving yet another reason to push forward.

This persistent curiosity to identify the needs of the market and solve their problems is the very essence of running any worthy business, especially in the dynamic field of technology.

A few weeks ago, I made a retrospective of changes and directions that we took up at Untitled Kingdom over the years. Together with the team, we’ve analysed the course of our development, the history of our projects, the outcomes of actions that we took up so far. Actions that, as time passed, were evolved, modified and improved, to let us bring more value to our clients and open to new markets, industries and technologies.

10 Years of Experience

Since Untitled Kingdom was established years ago, we knew we wanted to translate our programming experience into a highly reliable, clean code. But obviously, figuring out which path should we choose in the long run didn’t happen overnight. What we had from the very beginning was the vague vision of what we wanted to do. The vision which — further in time- developed, evaluated and flourished, driving us to the point where we’re now.

Over the years, our team expanded so did the spectrum of responsibilities that we handle. At the same time, we grew as people and learned to think two steps ahead. Up to today, we’ve learned how to take care of product development process from strategy, planning through efficient design and iterative development to growth engineering and optimisation.

Does this change mean something to our work?

Does it bring some improvements to projects that we run?

Well, I would say it gives a completely different angle to what we do.
Our experience let us shift our thinking from focusing on technology to perceiving our clients’ projects from a holistic perspective. This approach enables our team to grow ideas from their seeds to market-ready, validated products, and to deliver…

Premium Quality

Even when I look back in time, the top quality software was always our priority. But in fact, it was time, experience, and hundreds of hours of efforts, that drove us to yet another conclusion:

Quality is not only about coding.

Every application is the entire ecosystem, with software as it’s backbone. To make our clients’ product thrive, we don’t rely exclusively on the top-level code. Premium quality, as we perceive it, involves top class design (not only UX/UI but also the power of Service Design thinking), solid product strategy, reliable optimisation. Our definition of “Premium” involves the model of communication and engagement to client’s businesses.

Quality implies partnership.

Today we’re at the point, where our communication with clients is held daily via Slack chat or video calls. We keep constantly available not only to report on development progress but also to advise them whenever they need help with their business decisions or directions of development. We provide it because we treat our clients as partners — and partners support each other at every stage of their product development.

Obviously, we didn’t achieve this point overnight. We came up with ideas and tested them. Experimented, failed, learned and repeated.

During the years, we persisted on checking what works best for our team and our clients, and what brings the best results at the same time. Today, we know the struggle did pay off- the partnership approach is highly internalised by our team, and our approach is valued by our Partners.

Opening to new markets

10 years ago, when we started Untitled Kingdom, our first mission was to build a software solution for one of the biggest publishing houses in Poland. After the first few projects, the company started cooperating with UK-based startups, which soon became the majority (90%!) of our clients.

But as I wrote in the beginning — No business stays the same throughout its lifetime. Untitled Kingdom is continuously expanding and widening our working reach. We’re cooperating with world-renowned companies from e.g. UK, USA, Scandinavia, Germany … the list goes on.

This is definitely not the end of the path. The retrospective that we made let us form conclusions pointing out the path for the nearest future and form them in 3 bullet points:

Statement 1: Premium Services

The quality of our code, design or product management is far beyond average (our Partners’ words), and that’s how we want to keep it. But also, we’re widening the scope of our services and consulting range.

What’s does it actually mean?

During 10 years of developing our experience, we’ve supported our partners with more than product development. Our knowledge sharing culture combined with top experience gave us the position of advisors, proving our Partners with comprehensive consulting and effective execution in terms of building software, product development, design and beyond.

We help them make the best development decisions and support them to help them avoid costly business mistakes. Our team feels responsible not only for our Partners products but also for the overall success of their businesses.

Statement 2. Reason vs. technologies

From the first days of Untitled Kingdom existence, we’ve always been keen on tech novelties, and that’s a value that we want to maintain. So far, we’ve developed projects based on the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning or Blockchain. But we never take using a particular technology as a core goal. Instead, we took to asking:

What’s the purpose of the app?

What problems does it need to solve?

What will it give to its users?

We use technology as a tool that lets us reach a certain result (e.g. implementing a face recognition feature). Starting a project together with our Partner, we use particular technology when it’s a way to enable/ simplify the targeted outcomes. Whether it’s Kotlin, Swift, React.Native or Ruby, Machine Learning, Deep Learning or VR — we always choose the best fit for the project. And if we know that a certain technology is not the best option for the project, we say it straight away.

Statement 3. Focusing on impactful industries

Over the last 10 years, we’ve always aimed to help impactful startups, that bring a tangible change to users lives. This approach filled Untitled Kingdom’s office with impactful projects loved by users, such as Elvie, Fraim, Helpling, Bizzby or Ticketing Hub, just to name a few. What do they have in common? They are all a direct answer to a particular need of their users, and this is the very reason for their success.

Don’t get me wrong here: “ Focusing” doesn’t mean we’re not narrowing down the scope of our projects. We’re still aiming to cooperate with various industries and develop projects on every stage — the most important selector is if we believe

that the project brings a real change into users lives or digital transformation of businesses.

At the same time, we particularly cherish and believe in FemTech (Female Technology), HealthTech and Digital Transformation.
I’m happy to see these industries are developing more dynamically than ever before. All of them are taking the lead in bringing breakthrough solutions that push the word a few small steps forward a time.

Are you curious how we managed to follow our statements? Follow our blog carefully or sign up for our newsletter. In a few weeks, I’ll be writing about our projects and describing our new Premium Services. And if you want to ask a question concerning your project, drop us a note!