Rethinking your approach to digital products with Riverflex Foundry

It is an exciting time in the digital space, but to make sure these advances genuinely drive digital product excellence requires organisations to rethink how they plan, engineer and implement them. Helping companies do this is at the heart of our Foundry service.

Trends such as generative AI, machine learning and real-time customer intelligence undoubtedly have huge potential to enhance the employee and customer experience, and deliver return on investment. That’s why these areas are rapidly growing – private sector investment in AI is set to hit $200bn in 2025 according to Goldman Sachs.

Understandably, businesses don’t want to be left behind. But diving in without creating the right environment for these technologies to succeed is likely to lead to disappointing returns. To truly harness the potential of tech advances to create exceptional digital products, businesses and their people need to think and act differently.

What’s holding businesses back?

Every business is different, but there are common challenges that often prevent the development of digital products that hit the spot. In short, if tech isn’t part of a wider change strategy and aligned with business goals – and 52% of data and insight initiatives aren’t according to Harvard Business Review – barriers to successful adoption are likely to emerge, including:

• Prioritisation of the status quo over market-driven changes, plus difficulty adapting to new ways of working.
• Talent capability gaps that cause delays and errors.
• Rushed and inadequate technology and platform selection.
• Skipping of prototyping and validation, putting the product’s viability at risk.
• Poor data quality and a focus on performance metrics rather than strategic impact.
• Lack of clarity around how to scale and future-proof products.

Taken together these challenges can cause new tools and products to become marginalised, ineffective and, ultimately, a poor investment. They are part of the reason at least 70% of digital transformations fail to meet their original objectives according to Forbes.

Setting your transformation up for success

Our Foundry service is designed to overcome these challenges and support your development of digital products that drive commercial success.

By combining our expertise in the key tech trends, tools and platforms, with our data and analytical insights and a clear strategic purpose, the Foundry forges products that users and customers will keep coming back to. While enabling your team to take advantage of innovation and continually improve the products they offer.

What does that look like in practice? There are several key elements of the service that address each stage of a product’s lifecycle and will help your team to develop a mindset of continuous feedback and improvement:

Product strategy and transformation roadmap – we build the strategic foundations of your digital products, aligning them with overall business goals and demonstrating the value of developing customer-centric methodologies.

Product management – we support teams to master digital product management, balancing use-centric design, market fit and engineering excellence.

Product design: customer and UX – we create intuitive and engaging interfaces prioritising user experience and technological robustness for greater adoption.

Product engineering – our engineers deliver swift, cutting-edge solutions for holistic digital product engineering, and support your business to develop high performing agile teams.

Overseeing these strands is a product programme and strategic office that supports your product from strategy and execution, to testing and tracking its value once live. And because transparency is at the heart of the Foundry, your business will benefit from the predictability we bring in terms of the scope of the project, how quickly it can be achieved and the cost.

Foundry in action

We have applied this approach in companies across numerous sectors including agricultural products, retail, financial services and the media.

Our work has included developing solutions that monitor competitor products, incorporate as-a-service elements, provide real-time performance data, scale up digital transformations and improve app performance. In each case our Foundry service has created products that provide genuine competitive advantage.

We recently supported Fenix Outdoor, which owns several outdoor clothing and equipment brands, to build a data lake and pipeline to streamline its data handling and enhance the insights it gathers.
Using Azure services such as Data Lage Gen 2, Data Factory, Azure SQL, Databricks and KeyVault, we centralised financial data access and reduced redundancy, such as duplicate customer data. This has led to significant cost saving compared to the company’s previous business intelligence platform.

All our work is underpinned by the expertise at our fingertips and our commitment to quality and transparency. Christian Bader, Chief Information Officer of Fenix Outdoor says: “We have partnered with Riverflex on a number of projects now. I have always been impressed by the deep expertise of their team, the close collaboration with my people and the speed of delivering real results. They truly embody agile and lean approaches, proving this with the delivery of a new big data platform in less than three months, and a new cloud-based integration capability within weeks.”

Embedding a strategic approach

Tech advances undoubtedly have the power to elevate your digital products above the competition. But tech won’t achieve that in isolation.

It is easy to be swayed by flashy new tools, but understanding which ones are right for you and how to shape them into successful products is where the hard yards begin.

Our Foundry service pinpoints which data and AI capabilities can help your business achieve its objectives and engineers them into digital products that differentiate you from the crowd.

If you’d like to find out how the Foundry can support your business deliver excellent digital products, get in touch for a chat.