How do you build a digital product?

In the previous blog on ‘What is a Digital Product’ I shared with you the A B C D E of digital products. In this blog, I am going to explain what I meant by the characteristic ‘B’ i.e. ‘Build’.

We have a fairly good understanding of how the physical products are manufactured using different types of machines & tools using different knowledge bases and human resources. Similarly, the digital products also need to be built, but in a unique way, quite unlike the physical products. Hence, ‘How do you Build a digital product’ forms a unique characteristic that help us define the digital product.

Let us take a few examples:
Car, Chair, Pen, Mobile phone, Shoes, Aeroplane are all physical products and are manufactured in factories using tools & machines, human resources etc. Unlike traditional physical products, the digital products are not manufactured in factories using machines.
If you want to build a mobile game application, or a company wants to build a software to sell movie tickets, or the government wants to build a digital service to allow citizens to submit their tax returns, then neither of these could be built the way any physical product is built.

Instead, the digital product is a kind of software that is built using Information technology languages like Java, .Net, Scala and other open source languages, following Software Development Lifecycles and utilising methodologies of Waterfall, Agile, Lean etc.

There is process from ideation/conceptualization to design, followed with definition and delivery of the digital product alongside the process of marketing & selling the digital products, which is quite unique compared to the physical products. At the end of the day, the main ingredient of the digital product is not any physical item, but “lines of code” written by the technical/engineering team.

You build these digital products in an office space, sitting in your cubicles, bean bags or open workspace areas using your Laptop computers, Desktops, Keyboards, Mouse etc. along with other softwares that aid in the building of these digital products.

I will explain the next characteristic ‘C’ (How do we Consume the digital product) in detail in the next blog of this series. Hope this blog was useful. If you have any question related to Digital domain, write your questions to us. We will get back to you with an answer.

Thanks for reading!!

Your Product Coach,
Onkar