What to do when the Products are poor?

Hi,

I work at a small(ish) web agency and we’ve been fortunate enough to hit upon many of the big paradigm shifts while they were still in the custom built phase. (responsive websites, using WordPress as full blown CMS, Headless websites).

But now we have a new “problem”. A client is using A/B testing on their site. A/B-testing is clearly in the Product phase, but all the products come with big drawbacks. After learning about Wardley Mapping I feel kind of bad for selling a custom built solution to them.

Does anyone else recognise this challenge? In my opinion it makes sense for them to pay us to custom build a product that will be inferior in some respects (fewer features) but superior in others (no 3rd party code injection, no freezing of the render stack due to said code injection).

Great question, I guess my immediate reaction would be that the virtue of A/B testing to help the client establish the customer experience helps them determine if off the shelf products might be a viable option in the future but in the interim it would be ok to go with custom built if nothing meets the client need.

Thank you for your thoughts, they helped me see the issue better.

This morning on my way to work (it’s when I usually get my best ideas) I suddenly realized something about my problem. The issue wasn’t that there are products out there and that I should feel bad for us building a custom made one.

What was needed was a more precise definition of the user need. There are some needs that are met by the existing products but there are others that aren’t.

Our custom made product fixes thee needs that the available products can’t adress. Mainly that it runs server side, second need is the fact that it doesn’t inject 3rd party JavaScript on the site.

There are other server side / edge side A/B testing frameworks

I guess that challenge is how does you solution differ to theses, or could it complement one?

Mapping them might give you some answers!

I’m just going to ramble here for a bit on how I finally made peace with custom building products for our clients.

tl;dr

Just because there are Products in the same field that you have a need, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the Products/Commodities further down the path of evolution to custom build a product that perfectly matches your needs.

/tl;dr

We’ve done it again. That is, we custom built something in a crowded field of off the shelf products. Obviously that is good business for us (we do not implement other peoples systems)

I should clarify who we, we’re a small digital agency with roots all the way back in '97. We’ve managed to survive the .com bust AND the economic meltdown in '08 (and, knock on wood, so far it’s looking good during covid19). Each time we’ve made big adjustments to our offer or way of working. Each time we’ve moved towards open source and flexibility.

That is what instantly got me hooked on Wardley Mapping, I’ve seen the Genisis to Commodity life-cycle play out many times over the last two decades. It made such sense when I first saw it explained in a YouTUbe video.

So, that has made me worry that what we’re doing is counter to that proven logic.

But

What I’ve come to realize is that we’re using comodities and off the shelf products and services to create new tailor made systems that just a few years ago would be out of reach for most companies.

Our latest project is to build a robust CRM for a big International client. There is no shortage of CRM systems to pick and choose from. None of them would be just right. All of them would require
A) High initial set up and customisation cost
B) High monthly fixed cost

Thanks to recent advancements a small team can create this tailor made system at the cost of what the initial set up and customisation for an established system would be.

The advancements we’re relying on are among other things ant.design a ready made front end frame work for just this kind of thing. All the controls, tables etc are already done. The graphic design is set. “All” we had to do was run workshops to specify the features and then woreframe the different flows and views. Then hand it off to our coders.

It’s the classic play of using commodities to create new stuff in genesis (except we went straight to custom built).

But what really sealed the deal for me was when a friend who works for the regional hospital told me that they had spent three years and 500 0000 0000 SEK (about 48 million EUR) on trying to adapt (still not succeeded mind) a US made system for the administration of patients.