WillowTree Recognized in Q2 2020 Independent Research Evaluation of Digital Product Development Firms

We are proud to announce that WillowTree has been recognized as one of the top Digital Product Development firms in Forrester’s Q2 2020 Wave™ Report. This report identifies the top 12 vendors in digital product development, evaluating 29 criteria such as design process, development and test, time-to-market, innovation roadmap, and thought leadership (The Forrester Wave™: Digital Product Development Services, Q2 2020, Forrester Research, Inc.).

In the Now Tech report on digital product firms from earlier this year, Forrester cites three goals that investing in new or existing digital products can help companies accomplish:

• “Create new sources of customer value,
• Boost revenue and profitability, and
• Deliver a differentiated competitive advantage.”

(Now Tech: Digital Product Development Services, Q1 2020, Forrester Research, Inc.)

The Forrester Wave™ report further analyzes digital product development firms to determine leaders, strong performers, contenders, and challengers in the space. The 12 firms recognized shared two inclusion criteria:

• “Appeared in the preceding Now Tech as a new product developer
• Helped clients launch a valid new digital product in 2019.”

(The Forrester Wave™: Digital Product Development Services, Q2 2020, Forrester Research, Inc.)

According to the Wave™ report, “WillowTree brings clients excellent iterative and data-driven product design coupled with leading engineering quality.” WillowTree received the highest possible scores in the engineering quality and data-driven design criteria (The Forrester Wave™: Digital Product Development Services, Q2 2020, Forrester Research, Inc.).

Why WillowTree?

“Only trust ideas from those who can design and build them.”

Iterative Design + Development

Too often, the innovation process for a new digital product begins with an idea, rather than a problem or a need that the user has that could be solved by the product. WillowTree removes the guesswork of innovation with processes that quantify authentic customer needs, laddering up to a product with a CX that meets and exceeds customer expectations.

About 70% of companies approach a new product starting with many different ideas, and filtering out the ones that will likely fail. However, only 5% of new projects that take this approach of starting with an idea are successful. A problems-first approach instead recognizes that customers seek out and use digital products to solve a problem, accomplish a task, or get a job done. New innovations that start with the users’ problems have an 86% success rate.

That’s why WillowTree’s product strategy team begins with uncovering customer needs, using generative user research and desired outcome workshops to determine concept scorecards and roadmaps.

With this approach, product design becomes data-driven, with strategists, researchers, designers, engineers, and analytics architects working side-by-side through design sprints that are short and deeply iterative — so that the outcome of ideation, design, and prototyping is actionable via data-driven evaluation.

The development process is focused on increasing velocity while reducing risk, with the build-measure-learn cycle as a core of the process that enables user feedback and results to influence development both before and after launch.

Our engineers work in vertical slices in order to deliver a fully functionally and fully tested piece of software, with automated testing, monitoring, and security.

With continuous product optimization post-launch via SEO services, product analytics, and growth marketing, the full product lifecycle delivery stands out among other digital product firms.

The cornerstone of digital product innovation at WillowTree is “Only trust ideas from those who can design and build them.” When the marketplace and user needs are changing as rapidly as they are today, companies need to be able to execute and iterate quickly — with a team that can be more than a vendor or a consultant, but a true partner throughout the entire product lifecycle.