Strategic development brings projects to market faster | Acro Commerce
Laura Meshen

Author

Laura Meshen

, Content Marketing Specialist

Posted in Software & Development

March 24, 2021

Strategic development brings projects to market faster

Part of Acro Commerce’s success is our purpose-driven development model. Our strategic development process and the use of open source technology have helped our clients get their development projects online faster and lead them to become market leaders.

Acro Commerce helps our clients become more competitive and bring online projects to market faster using open source technology. Open source allows us to avoid ever having to say the words “that’s not an option” to our partners. But technology alone is not enough for our partners to become market leaders.

Speed-to-market is key for any organization. Whether the solution is consumer-facing or for internal use only, time is of the essence in implementing new products. Running projects through our strategic development process allows our clients to edge out the competition by getting a live product to market in months, not years.

Strategic development process

As part of our agile development process and continuous innovation methodology, Acro Commerce has spent years developing a strategic development method that combines modules, tools and processes. Our goal is to develop tailored solutions that alleviate your business pains at all stages. No matter the size, big or small we take this approach to create a tailored project to match your request and operations. With our multi-step approach, we cover these crucial areas:

Consulting

Our project development process starts with several high-level consulting meetings to review your business strategy and pain points. In this stage our solution architects start connecting your business strategy to a technology path, reviewing assets, and assigning requirements for phase 2 planning and deeper discovery. Once we have guided you through our consultation process, and you have chosen to move into a development project with us, we really get into the meat and potatoes of the Acro Commerce purpose-driven, or Agile, development method.

More information on our consulting services can be found here

Discovery & strategy

In the illustration above, it looks like discovery & strategy are 2 separate processes, but in our experience, we find that they often run concurrently.

The goal at this phase is to uncover all the unique insights and business requirements that you have to create the perfect match between an open source framework and your business model. This is a collaborative process that allows you to explore the best possible options for your business, guided by our digital commerce experts. This phase is iterative, so you’re not locked into a predetermined spec list. This allows for choice and adaptability.

We rely on our solution architects and subject matter experts to run multiple initiatives in parallel; identifying operational and technical needs, as well as solution planning through:

  • Workshops — interactive sessions where our creative and technical teams work with your team to discover the best approach and set of deliverables.
  • Prototype — a visual prototype that defines user interactions.
  • Technical discovery document — used to define the technical and business logic.
  • Development roadmap with detailed timelines.

More information on the Discovery & strategy process can be found here

Experience Design

Experience Design is the next phase of project development. This is where we dig in and really get to know your customer from a user experience perspective. Creating the individual user experience that your brand desires means including the following into your project:

  • Mapping customer journey
  • User experience audits
  • World-class UX and UI design development
  • Analysis of your competitor’s design
  • Strategy for enhancing and scaling your digital solution
  • Creative design for web
  • Accessibility and responsive design

More information on the Experience Design process can be found here

Development

Pilot / MVP (minimum viable product) projects

The need for thorough planning is important but moving fast, and pivoting fast once development starts is crucial. Our planning and discovery process fast-flows into an extremely organized initial development phase, with our main focus being speed-to-market.

We build measurable value into the first version of your minimum viable product while driving to get it live as quickly as possible. This allows our clients to see the product in action quickly and start using the solutions to achieve the business objectives they were intended for.

Post-pilot development and scaling

Post pilot is when teams start to settle into our Agile development process, continuing to move quickly in 2 or 3-week development cycles, helping your teams realize scalable growth and continuous improvement.

More information on Development services can be found here

Support services

Beyond implementation and scaling, our teams offer post-launch support that can be customized to cover capital planning and budgeting support, load testing, hosting services, security management and 24/7 emergency response services.

More information on our support services can be found here

A strategic development process customized specifically to bring projects to market faster

Acro Commerce has developed this proven method to increase speed-to-market for our development projects. This has resulted in increased product margins, sales volumes and overall market share for many of our clients. This detailed and proven Agile process is always why we win new contracts and retain clients long after the first project launch.

Let us customize that process around your business needs and show you how this proven method will get your solution to market, fast.