Opinion Our Insights Post 5 mins Arran Kirkup Does your agency challenge your thinking? If they don’t then they aren’t doing their job! Here at Indiespring we firmly believe the value of any good software development agency lies primarily in the experience and expertise they hold rather than in blindly developing to a spec. If that’s what you need you’ll be better served elsewhere. And that’s fine by us; we weren’t going to work out anyway. That’s because we know the best agencies exist to help design the perfect solution to your problem. This means starting with the problem you want to solve, not the solution you would like implemented. Indiespring have followed this mantra since our inception and our established framework and processes mean we can understand your circumstances, diagnose the problem and design a perfect solution which will deliver real value in the areas that matter to you most. The fact is that most agencies don’t see things this way. They’re happy to be pleasant order takers and get paid a decent day’s wage for a decent day’s work. Again, this is fine. But these agencies aren’t the agencies who will challenge your thinking then elevate it. These agencies would rather release something that’s “good enough” than risk upsetting you. These agencies will develop serviceable but forgettable products which don’t deliver their true value. That’s where Indiespring are different. And it’s this mantra which allows us to share the risk and reward in many of the projects we engage in.But how exactly does this work... The most important phase of any project is the discovery and design process. This is where yout Agency needs to take the lead and have the time and freedom to bring their specialists to the problem. Designing and developing any digital product is tough; especially if your are not experience in delivering this type of experience and you will likely make all the mistakes other before you have. Our specialist team have been designing and building mobile applications from the ground up for years and have likely faced most of the problems you’re getting stuck on 10 times before so sometimes getting the right experts even if you have the capability of developing the solution yourself is the right choice. The design process we follow needs the time, structure and support from you to be successful. It’s the most critical stage for the project’s success and we won’t put our name against a solution that hasn’t had the attention it requires. During our Discovery Workshop you can expect certain lines of questioning which might make you feel a little uncomfortable. We won’t take your assumptions for granted and we’ll want to delve into the nitty gritty of the problem you’re trying to solve. The solutions we recommend may bear little resemblance to what you thought you wanted. But, those solutions will genuinely be the ones we know will deliver maximum value against your goals. We work with clients who acknowledge they need us to take the lead in the early stages of the engagement so we can task our best people with diagnosing your problem. These clients rely on our expertise to design a compelling and effective solution and they trust us to deliver results; not just to build them their product. It’s for this reason we don’t respond to RFPs nor compete in formalised pitch processes. Do you ever really feel you’re getting the best results from an agency when you’ve submitted an RFP? They’ve spent virtually no time working on solving your problem but who can blame them when they’ve not even had a conversation with you to diagnose it! They’ll instead spend time putting together pitch decks and making themselves look good. They might even try to give you early designs to wow you with how great your own ideas are. This is great if all you’re interested in are their vanity metrics or if you want the insurance of being able to point out how great their pitch looked when it all goes wrong down the line. Not so great if you’re serious about doing things the right way. The fact is you’re short changing yourself and your business if you don’t provide the opportunity to allow your agency to understand your requirements and challenges and put our best people on building and designing a solution that will trully work. If you can’t give them at least that, we and they won’t be working with you; because “good enough” isn’t good enough for people who really believe in what they do.
