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How to Create and Organize a Product Backlog and Turn Your Roadmap into a Product in an Agile Way

How to Create and Organize a Product Backlog and Turn Your Roadmap into a Product in an Agile Way

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

In an environment where the demand for rapid, reliable delivery converges with increasingly complex IT projects, the Product Backlog becomes far more than a simple list of features: it is the true engine of agile delivery. A living, structured roadmap in backlog form facilitates the prioritization of business needs, guides development, and enables the anticipation of technical dependencies. For the IT departments of large enterprises and digital transformation teams, mastering this lever is essential to deliver value each sprint while staying agile amid shifting priorities.

Structuring an agile backlog lays the foundation for continuous, controlled delivery

A well-structured backlog translates the product roadmap into clear, prioritized operational initiatives. It guarantees traceability of business objectives and transparency for all stakeholders.

Define the scope and level of granularity

Each backlog item must deliver a measurable value for the organization—whether it addresses a user need, a technical improvement, or a regulatory requirement. Items should be granular enough to be delivered within a single sprint, yet broad enough to preserve the strategic vision of the roadmap. Too coarse a breakdown invites uncertainty around actual effort, while excessive fragmentation burdens management and complicates prioritization.

The Product Owner works closely with business stakeholders to identify priority objectives. This collaboration ensures that every User Story or epic carries a clearly documented business rationale, minimizing unnecessary back-and-forth during development. Consequently, the chosen level of granularity also simplifies estimation and progress tracking.

In practice, it’s common to structure the backlog across three levels: epics to group large functional blocks, features to define the scope of a sprint, and detailed User Stories to guide technical teams. When understood and adhered to by all, this hierarchy becomes the red thread of agile planning.

A telling example comes from a Swiss watchmaking company. Faced with a dense roadmap, its IT team first defined epics focused on automating production processes, then broke each epic down into features and User Stories. This structured approach reduced backlog-grooming clarification tickets by 25%.

Link the product roadmap to the operational backlog

A roadmap conveys the medium- to long-term vision, while the backlog details the immediate actions needed to realize that vision. Formalizing the connection between these two levels is crucial: without it, delivery may derail from strategic objectives. Roadmap milestones and key dates feed backlog items for prioritization.

During planning ceremonies, the Product Owner presents the strategic elements derived from the roadmap to guide the selection of User Stories for delivery. This synchronization helps sprint teams maintain coherence between short-term tasks and the project’s overarching trajectory. It also secures decision-making when resources conflict or deadlines tighten.

The linkage is often implemented through dedicated fields in the backlog management tool, enhancing reporting and traceability. Each item then records its originating roadmap, its priority level, and its expected impact. This discipline prevents teams from focusing on peripheral tasks disconnected from business goals.

A banking group project illustrates this best practice: the roadmap defined quarterly milestones for adding online service modules, and each quarter was broken into sprints aligned with the expected deliverables. The result: a 95% compliance rate of releases against strategic objectives.

Ensure transparency and shared understanding

For the backlog to serve as a unifying tool, all participants—business stakeholders, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and development teams—must embrace its prioritization and operation. Regular reviews verify the understanding of User Stories and allow content adjustments before a sprint begins. This alignment phase reduces the risk of misunderstandings and rework at sprint’s end.

Detailed descriptions paired with clear acceptance criteria also streamline onboarding of new team members or external contractors. Backlog items become self-explanatory: each one documents its context, objectives, and required tests.

Transparency is further supported by a shared, accessible backlog tool—Jira, Azure DevOps, or equivalent. Collaborative enrichment of items strengthens ownership and encourages early feedback. Hybrid working groups, blending internal and external expertise, benefit particularly.

By breaking down silos and fostering a culture of clarity, the organization gains in agility and responsiveness—critical factors in large-scale digital transformation projects.

Build your backlog: formats, typologies, and prioritization

The quality of a backlog is measured by the relevance of its item formats and the coherence of its prioritization. A well-designed backlog streamlines decision-making and accelerates business objectives.

Select the right item formats

Choosing the appropriate format—User Story, Bug, Technical Story, Epic—should reflect the nature of the task and its role in delivered value. User Stories, centered on the end user, are ideal for functional requirements. Technical stories document infrastructure work or refactoring without diluting the business vision.

Standardized criteria ensure consistent descriptions: as a [role], I want [goal] so that [benefit]. Adhering to this template simplifies estimation and validation. Adding concise, measurable acceptance criteria prevents ambiguity.

In hybrid environments, enablers can prepare technical prerequisites (prototypes, spikes, proofs of concept). Each format must be clearly identified and classified to avoid confusion during backlog grooming.

A Swiss subsidiary of a mid-sized industrial group applied these formats when overhauling its customer portal. A strict division into nine business epics and forty user stories established a reliable plan, reducing clarification time in planning poker by 30%.

Categorize and slice to optimize readability

An overly long, poorly structured backlog is incomprehensible. Organizing items into swimlanes or releases groups them by functional area or deadline, improving readability and guiding prioritization meetings.

Vertical slicing (complete features) is recommended to limit dependencies and ensure immediately valuable deliveries. Each slice yields a testable, deployable functional increment, boosting team motivation and stakeholder confidence.

Cross-cutting features—security, accessibility, performance—belong in a parallel backlog overseen by the Product Owner in coordination with the technical architect. This governance ensures non-functional requirements are met without losing sight of business value.

A financial services group in French-speaking Switzerland tested this approach: dedicated swimlanes for compliance and performance prevented these critical topics from competing directly with business enhancements, while ensuring rigorous tracking.

Prioritize your backlog rigorously using clear criteria

Prioritization rests on shared criteria: business impact, estimated effort, technical risk, and strategic alignment. Methods like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) provide frameworks to score and order items by relative value.

Quantitative scoring makes trade-offs more objective and reduces endless debates during sprint planning. A composite indicator derived from weighted criteria guides the selection of items for each sprint backlog.

Applying these methods requires upfront work: data collection, cost assessment, and estimation of potential return on investment. A seasoned Product Owner facilitates scoring workshops to ensure prioritization remains factual and unbiased.

A Swiss industrial machinery manufacturer introduced a monthly RICE prioritization workshop. The outcome: a six-month roadmap was adjusted three times faster, with enhanced visibility on business feedback and a 20% reduction in time-to-market.

Implement a modular, evolutive backlog

Large projects demand a modular backlog. Introducing reusable components, decomposable epics, and User Story templates ensures uniformity and speeds up the formalization of new needs. This modularity also reduces backlog maintenance effort.

An evolutive backlog integrates retrospective feedback and roadmap changes. Regular adjustments prevent item obsolescence and avoid the accumulation of stale elements that can weigh down management.

Modularity also involves managing sub-backlogs: product backlog, sprint backlog, and technical backlog. Each addresses a specific level of granularity and facilitates coordination among the PO, Scrum Master, and development teams.

In a project for a Swiss retail multinational, custom backlog templates for each business and technical domain cut sprint preparation time by 40% while maintaining cross-domain consistency.

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Organize backlog grooming and keep the priority list alive

Backlog grooming is a key ritual for maintaining item quality, relevance, and clarity. A living backlog continuously adapts to new needs and field feedback.

Schedule regular, focused sessions

Backlog grooming sessions are ideally held weekly or bi-weekly, depending on sprint cadence. They bring together the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and, as needed, business or technical experts. The goal is to review upcoming items, refine descriptions, clarify doubts, and estimate effort.

Each session should follow a clear agenda: reaffirm priorities, refine acceptance criteria, and split overly large User Stories. This preparation prevents teams from entering a sprint with an unclear backlog.

Discipline and regularity ensure a backlog ready for sprint planning. Tickets are validated, estimated, and sequenced, making meetings more operational and productive.

On a project for a Swiss digital services company, introducing a 90-minute grooming meeting every Wednesday morning halved the number of open points at sprint start, streamlining planning poker.

Engage stakeholders and enrich the definition

To deepen functional understanding, it’s useful to involve business representatives, architects, and security experts on occasion. Their insights help adjust constraints, identify dependencies, and assess risks.

This collaborative process strengthens backlog ownership: each stakeholder sees their needs addressed and contributes to item quality. It also improves anticipation of bottlenecks or technical hurdles.

Co-constructing acceptance criteria and test scenarios reduces back-and-forth between teams and limits surprises during implementation.

A telecommunications company lowered its sprint rework rate from 18% to under 5% by systematically involving a security expert in grooming for all sensitive items.

Use backlog tools as efficiency levers

Platforms like Jira offer advanced features: dynamic filters, custom fields, temporary or permanent epics. Custom configuration simplifies navigation and item updates. Configurable workflows ensure adherence to definition, validation, and delivery steps.

Integrating plugins for dependency mapping or metric tracking (Lead Time, Cycle Time) enhances visibility into the workflow. Shared dashboards communicate key indicators to stakeholders.

Implementing automations—conditional transitions, notifications, report generation—frees time to focus on qualitative backlog analysis rather than repetitive tasks.

In a complex integration context, a Swiss industrial firm deployed a Kanban board linked to Jira gadgets to visualize inter-team dependencies. The tool reduced blockers by 30% and accelerated item flow.

Feed the backlog with continuous feedback

The backlog isn’t limited to planned evolutions: it also incorporates user feedback, production incidents, and emerging regulatory needs. Support and maintenance processes should trigger automatic or semi-automatic ticket creation for prioritization.

A feedback loop between support, DevOps, and the Product Owner ensures that anomalies or improvement suggestions flow directly into the backlog. This responsiveness helps maintain end-user satisfaction and prevents technical debt accumulation.

A unified backlog, where all incoming streams converge, provides a holistic view of ongoing work. It also facilitates global trade-offs during IT steering committees.

One financial institution reduced critical incident resolution time by 40% by automating ticket creation and prioritization from support directly into the sprint backlog.

Adapt your backlog to the complexity of large-scale projects

Large-scale projects require a multi-level backlog and strong governance. Implementing KPIs and cross-functional reviews guarantees coherent, aligned execution.

Structure multiple backlog levels

To manage a program or project portfolio at scale, it’s common to distinguish the portfolio backlog, the product backlog, and the sprint backlog. Each level addresses a different time horizon and stakeholder group, from steering committees to ground teams.

The portfolio backlog aggregates major business initiatives and flagship projects, while the product backlog details the needs of a digital product or service. The sprint backlog then focuses on the granularity required for a sprint.

This segmentation limits cognitive overload for teams and allows prioritization based on strategic impact while retaining the ability to iterate quickly on critical features.

In a Swiss digital consortium, this three-level organization enabled efficient synchronization of ten agile teams working on interconnected microservices, while providing unified visibility to management.

Establish cross-functional governance

Governance of a large-scale project backlog relies on a backlog committee composed of IT directors, business leads, architects, and Product Owners. Its role is to validate priorities, resolve conflicts, and ensure adherence to agile principles.

Quarterly reviews assess progress via indicators and adjust the roadmap in response to new constraints or opportunities. This periodic re-evaluation prevents the backlog from becoming obsolete amid rapid context changes.

Inter-team collaboration is facilitated by regular synchronization ceremonies (Scrum of Scrums) where dependencies and blockers are discussed and resolved.

At a Swiss para-public organization, setting up a multidisciplinary backlog committee smoothed decision-making and cut the time between functional request and development kick-off by 15%.

Track and analyze performance KPIs

Backlog performance is measured by KPIs such as lead time, cycle time, throughput, or percentage of items delivered versus planned. These metrics shed light on process efficiency and highlight areas for improvement.

Continuous monitoring of these indicators, integrated into the agile dashboard, guides capacity adjustments, resource allocation, and workflow optimization.

Trend analysis over multiple sprints reveals load variations, bottlenecks, and delivery chain anomalies. It enables data-driven decisions to maintain a sustainable delivery pace.

An investment bank deployed a custom dashboard combining lead time and sprint completion rates. With these insights, it rebalanced teams between product and technical backlogs, improving delivery by 20% in three months.

Anticipate backlog debt and dependencies

A poorly managed backlog can accumulate “backlog debt”: aging items, hidden dependencies, deferred continuous improvement. To prevent this, schedule periodic obsolescence reviews and item refinement sessions.

Technical or functional dependencies, identified during planning, should be explicitly recorded in each item. Dedicated fields in the backlog tool allow quick visualization of links and informed trade-offs.

Continual refactoring practices and periodic cleanup of old User Stories limit obsolete elements. They ensure a dynamic backlog aligned with strategy while preserving delivery smoothness.

By maintaining a “healthy” backlog, organizations ensure no priority item is forgotten and that each sprint delivers perceptible value, even in complex, multi-team projects.

Activate your roadmap with an optimized agile backlog

A structured, prioritized, and continuously updated backlog is the beating heart of an agile organization. By aligning the business roadmap with a clear, hierarchical list of items, you simplify decision-making, reduce bottlenecks, and boost responsiveness. Grooming rituals, RICE or WSJF scoring methods, and KPI implementation enable precise progress tracking and permanent adaptation to market changes.

Whatever the size or complexity of your projects, Edana’s experts are here to help you structure your backlog, establish appropriate governance, and deploy agile best practices. They support your teams in transforming your roadmap into a high-performance, sustainable delivery engine.

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Mariami Minadze

Mariami is an expert in digital strategy and project management. She audits the digital presences of companies and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, and orchestrates strategies and plans that generate value for our customers. Highlighting and piloting solutions tailored to your objectives for measurable results and maximum ROI is her specialty.

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Featured-Post-UX-Design (EN) UI/UX Design EN

Inclusive Design: A Strategic Imperative for High-Performing, Sustainable Products

Inclusive Design: A Strategic Imperative for High-Performing, Sustainable Products

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

Integrating inclusion from the outset of a digital product’s design is not merely a moral or regulatory imperative. Above all, it is a performance lever that boosts adoption, optimizes the user experience, and extends the lifespan of your solutions. In a context where audience diversity, devices, and skill levels continue to grow, inclusive design becomes a strategic advantage: it anticipates barriers, reduces support costs, and broadens potential markets. This article explores the foundations of inclusive design, its business and technological benefits, the frictions it prevents, and the concrete gains observed, illustrated by anonymized Swiss case studies.

What is inclusive design?

Inclusive design seeks to create accessible, understandable experiences for all, regardless of abilities, contexts, or cultures. It relies on user-centered methods and proven standards to ensure optimal accessibility.

Fundamental principles of inclusive design

Inclusive design rests on acknowledging the diversity of needs and usage scenarios. It requires avoiding assumptions about users’ abilities or preferences and considering a wide spectrum of profiles from the earliest sketches. The goal is to minimize barriers—whether visual, motor, cognitive, or cultural—and to create self-explanatory interfaces.

To achieve this, designers adopt an iterative approach in which each feature is tested and validated by a representative panel. This proactive process avoids costly late-stage adaptations and ensures lasting functional clarity. Feedback from these tests continuously enriches the design foundation.

Moreover, inclusive design promotes flexibility: choosing legible fonts, ensuring sufficient contrast, maintaining coherent navigation, and providing informative micro-interactions. This level of rigor becomes part of UX governance, ensuring that every update or extension meets the same accessibility criteria.

User-centered approach

At the heart of inclusive design lies user research. It involves identifying the expectations, frustrations, and behaviors of diverse groups through interviews, workshops, and testing sessions. These qualitative and quantitative insights guide the creation of diverse personas, including profiles with visual, auditory, cognitive, or age-related impairments.

Designing usage scenarios helps simulate extreme contexts: low-vision users navigating under bright sunlight on an entry-level smartphone, seniors using an interface for the first time, or expatriates unfamiliar with the language. These cases highlight potential friction points and feed the product roadmap.

Next, high-fidelity mockups incorporate adaptive solutions: alternative text, voice commands, keyboard navigation, contextual guides, and multilingual support. Each component is documented in a design-system library, ensuring reusability and consistency of best practices.

Standards and reference frameworks for compliant inclusive design

To guarantee a proven level of accessibility, teams refer to the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). These standards cover all technical and ergonomic criteria required for optimal compliance, with levels A, AA, or AAA depending on needs and resources.

Beyond WCAG, more specific frameworks may apply—such as the European EN 301 549 standard for public solutions or internal directives in sensitive sectors. Adopting these benchmarks structures the development cycle, from scoping to final QA.

Finally, a combination of manual and automated accessibility audits measures the gap between the current state and set objectives. It identifies blocking points and proposes pragmatic action plans, prioritized by user impact and implementation effort.

Example: a Swiss financial institution implemented an accessible design system from the start of its digital redesign. Thanks to a unified library, it cut accessibility anomalies by 40% during testing phases and accelerated the delivery of new features.

Why integrate inclusion from the design phase?

Embedding inclusion at the earliest stages enhances functional clarity, reduces product debt, and strengthens experience consistency. Early iterations limit the risk of major redesigns and optimize return on investment.

Improved user adoption

An interface designed for everyone produces a faster learning curve. Users locate information and features more readily, increasing satisfaction and trust. This fluidity translates into quicker scaling during large-scale rollouts.

Key metrics—task completion rate, average session time, error rate—show significant gains at launch. Onboarding flows and adaptive tutorials reinforce best practices and reduce resistance to change, especially among less tech-savvy profiles.

For example, a major Swiss industrial group saw a 25% increase in its internal platform’s adoption rate after introducing inclusive design elements: keyboard-only form inputs and a “reading mode.”

Reduction of product debt

Any accessibility improvements made at a project’s end usually require corrective development work and additional testing phases. Integrating these requirements from the design phase limits technical complexity and anticipates edge cases, avoiding unnecessary maintenance overhead.

Documenting accessible components and maintaining a design system ensures reliable reuse. Developers save time by not having to invent or patch ad-hoc solutions. Over time, the software architecture remains more modular and maintainable.

For instance, in a client portal project, our audit revealed that 60% of accessibility gaps could be addressed upfront without affecting the initial timeline. The QA cycle savings freed up two weeks of development on a three-month sprint.

Enhanced compliance and reputation

In an increasingly stringent regulatory environment—particularly for public services and critical platforms—designing for accessibility from the start avoids penalties and negative publicity. Compliance thus becomes a competitive advantage.

Beyond legal requirements, companies demonstrating an inclusive commitment improve their brand image. This attracts not only customers who value these principles but also talent seeking a responsible, innovative workplace.

A Swiss insurance company leveraged its WCAG AA certification to promote its new mobile app, strengthening its CSR positioning and driving a 15% increase in downloads within three months of launch.

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How does the inclusive approach anticipate late-stage friction?

An inclusive process identifies and resolves obstacles early—whether related to user diversity, device variety, or skill levels—thereby preventing cost overruns and production delays.

Aging audience

With demographic aging, more users require tailored interfaces: adjustable text, enhanced contrast, and simplified controls. Ignoring this reality often leads to a surge in support tickets or premature abandonment.

A dedicated test phase with senior users reveals blocking issues—such as too-small touch targets or ambiguous labels—and drives targeted improvements before the first beta release.

A Swiss energy services provider added a “high-visibility” mode to its app, resulting in a 30% drop in readability-related support calls.

Device variety and usage contexts

Today’s users access services on a broad range of devices: entry-level smartphones, tablets, legacy PCs, or niche terminals. Each context exposes interfaces to different technical and ergonomic constraints.

Testing prototypes on a representative device panel uncovers loading delays, layout issues, or invisible elements. These insights guide the choice of modular, hybrid, and scalable architectures tailored to real-world performance.

For example, a public authority reduced technical disruptions by 80% after decomposing its interface into microservices and optimizing requests on outdated government terminals.

Cultural differences and tech proficiency

Usage patterns vary across cultures, languages, and previous experiences. Icons or metaphors can be interpreted differently, causing misunderstandings or navigation errors.

Collecting multilingual and multicultural feedback during design allows you to adjust vocabulary, information structure, and user flows. Adding clear, neutral microcopy prevents misinterpretation.

A B2B platform serving international subsidiaries of a Swiss group halved functional issues reported by its Asian branch after harmonizing translations and simplifying the menu hierarchy.

Concrete examples of gains from inclusive digital product design

Inclusive design delivers measurable outcomes: improved retention, lower support costs, expanded audiences, and enhanced brand value.

Better retention and loyalty

When users quickly find what they need, engagement rises. Thirty-day retention rates are often 10%–20% higher for an accessible interface compared to a standard version.

Personalization features—such as text-size adjustments or a dark-mode switch—create a sense of control and belonging. Users return more frequently, fostering upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

For example, a digital services provider saw an 18% increase in recurring sessions after introducing interface personalization options and an integrated voice assistant.

Reduction in support and training costs

An intuitive, predictable interface reduces reliance on tutorials and customer support. FAQs become leaner and support tickets drop, allowing teams to focus on higher-value tasks.

Over the long term, ongoing maintenance is simplified: accessibility-related bug fixes virtually disappear, QA efforts decrease, and deployment cycles accelerate.

A large Swiss manufacturer reported a 35% reduction in helpdesk calls after its inclusive intranet redesign for over 5,000 employees.

Expanded audience and brand enhancement

An inclusive solution appeals to a broader audience: people with disabilities, seniors, non-native speakers, or less tech-savvy employees. Each additional segment represents growth potential.

An inclusive commitment also elevates brand perception as responsible and socially engaged. Media coverage and accessibility certifications build trust with partners and institutional clients.

A nationwide Swiss retailer saw a 12% increase in online traffic after highlighting its accessibility label and customization options, clearly differentiating itself from competitors.

Make inclusion a driver of performance and sustainability

Inclusive design is not an extra cost but a strategic investment that accelerates adoption, reduces product debt, and elevates brand value. By anticipating diverse profiles, devices, and contexts, you limit redesigns, control time-to-market, and optimize resources.

Our expert teams design hybrid, modular, open-source ecosystems—free of vendor lock-in and aligned with your business needs. They support you in UX auditing, adaptive design implementation, microcopy development, and selecting sustainable technological solutions.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert

PUBLISHED BY

Mariami Minadze

Mariami is an expert in digital strategy and project management. She audits the digital presences of companies and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, and orchestrates strategies and plans that generate value for our customers. Highlighting and piloting solutions tailored to your objectives for measurable results and maximum ROI is her specialty.

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Featured-Post-UX-Design (EN) UI/UX Design EN

Focus Group: How to Gather Your Customer Insights and Guide Your Strategic Decisions

Focus Group: How to Gather Your Customer Insights and Guide Your Strategic Decisions

Auteur n°15 – David

In a context where strategic decisions hinge on a deep understanding of user behaviors and expectations, the focus group stands out as a qualitative method that goes beyond mere numbers. It enables in-depth exploration of participants’ perceptions and motivations, uncovering insights often absent from analytics and A/B tests. This article unpacks the available formats, the essential steps to structure a discussion group, and the best practices to turn customer feedback into actionable guidance for your digital projects.

Why the focus group complements your quantitative methods

The focus group provides a nuanced understanding of user behaviors and emotions. It bridges the gap between raw data and product or marketing decisions.

Define objectives and method complementarity

Before organizing a session, clearly define the questions your focus group will address: understanding a use case, validating a concept, or exploring adoption barriers. This preparatory phase guides your choice of format and participant profile.

Unlike online surveys, a guided discussion lets you follow up on participants’ remarks, probe specific points, or clarify intentions. The qualitative insights gained enrich conversion metrics and usage indicators.

This complementarity makes focus groups particularly effective for contextualizing trends spotted on dashboards, adding depth and meaning to the numbers.

Delve into users’ motivations and barriers

By facilitating user-to-user exchanges, focus groups reveal implicit motivations, psychological barriers, or misconceptions about the service—elements often invisible in quantitative analyses.

A cohesive moderator encourages participants to build on each other’s comments, generating interactions that yield unexpected learnings. Moderators can then adjust the discussion flow to explore emergent themes in greater detail.

The richness of spoken testimony provides precise verbatim quotes, essential for crafting more targeted marketing messages or refining the user experience.

Use case: Swiss SME in financial services

A Swiss SME specializing in mobile payment solutions convened ten professional users for a two-hour session. Participants from various sectors (retail, hospitality, healthcare) discussed transaction flows and notification perceptions.

The session revealed a major obstacle: ambiguous confirmation labels. Thanks to direct user suggestions, the product team reworded key terms, reducing support requests related to the refund process by 25%.

This qualitative feedback complemented usage analytics and uncovered an emotional dimension (trust and clarity) unattainable through quantitative tools alone.

Focus group formats and their suitability by objective

Several group formats exist to meet specific needs. Your choice depends on size, duration, and topic sensitivity.

The classic format for in-depth discussions

A traditional focus group typically gathers 6 to 10 participants for 90 to 120 minutes. It fosters collective interaction and covers multiple aspects of the topic using a pre-established guide.

Having all stakeholders present simultaneously ensures a group dynamic where ideas spark off one another, revealing more contrasted opinions.

This format remains the go-to when you aim to obtain a comprehensive overview of perceptions and expectations around a new service or major update.

The duel format for comparing two concepts or prototypes

A duel focus group pits two prototypes or two competing concepts under the same conditions. Feedback focuses on each option’s strengths and weaknesses.

The moderator asks participants to evaluate both proposals in turn, then debate their perceived differences. This confrontation highlights discriminating factors.

This format is ideal for product managers who need to choose swiftly between two design paths.

The mini-focus group for quick, targeted exchanges

When the subject is highly specialized or the target population hard to mobilize, a mini-focus group of 3 to 5 people offers a pragmatic solution. Sessions can be as short as 60 minutes.

Fewer participants ensure everyone speaks freely but require a tightly structured moderation to cover essential topics.

This format is often used for preliminary studies or rapid iterations within an agile approach.

Remote focus group for geographically dispersed participants

With the rise of remote work, conducting focus groups via video platforms has become common. It eliminates logistical constraints and simplifies international participation.

Online moderation tools (virtual rooms, live polls, digital whiteboards) preserve the richness of discussions while offering native recording of interactions.

This format demands special attention to technical quality (connectivity, audio, video) and speaking-time management.

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How to structure your focus group for maximum impact

Preparation largely determines the value of your insights. Each step—from defining objectives to analyzing verbatim—must be rigorous and context-adapted.

Set clear, measurable objectives

Define precise goals: test a feature, assess offer comprehension, or identify cultural barriers. Objectives guide your discussion guide and question selection.

Each question should align with a strategic issue, whether optimizing user experience, refining marketing messaging, or prioritizing development tasks.

Measurable objectives also allow you to benchmark feedback against pre-set KPIs after the session.

Select and recruit relevant participants

Participants should match your target personas: market segments, role in the client organization, or solution usage level. A mix of novice and expert users enriches discussion.

Recruitment can leverage existing panels, customer databases, or partner networks. Aim for diverse perspectives while maintaining thematic coherence.

A qualification form will specify inclusion and exclusion criteria to ensure profile representativeness.

Prepare a structured yet flexible discussion guide

The guide outlines topics and proposes a logical question order, while leaving room for moderator improvisation. Each section starts with a discussion objective.

Combine open-ended, factual, and projective questions to capture concrete experiences and anticipate future uses. Alternate between individual questions and group debates.

A good guide also includes interactive exercises (cards, visual scales) to stimulate creativity and encourage spontaneous expression.

Moderation and logistics: ensure a smooth session

Successful moderation depends on establishing trust, prompting participants, and managing speaking time. Open follow-ups invite nuance without steering responses.

Logistical preparation (venue, note-taking materials, audio/video recording, refreshments) contributes to a professional, comfortable atmosphere.

A technical moderator handling back-office support resolves any issues swiftly, ensuring high-quality exchanges.

Use case: Industrial group in French-speaking Switzerland

An industrial player in Romandy ran a mini-focus group with four business leaders to validate a new dashboard. Participants tested an interactive prototype and suggested label refinements for indicators.

The process revealed a need for additional dynamic filters and a color-coding scheme to highlight critical data. These insights were directly incorporated into the functional roadmap.

This structured discussion phase saved several development iterations and improved end-user adoption.

Analyze and turn insights into strategic decisions

Systematic analysis of verbatim ensures key learnings are captured. Translating feedback into concrete actions delivers pragmatic ROI.

Transcription and coding of qualitative data

Audio or video recordings are fully transcribed for text-based analysis. Each comment is anonymized and timestamped for easy reference.

Coding involves tagging text segments with thematic labels (motivations, barriers, suggestions). This can be done manually or using semi-automated annotation tools.

Thorough classification sets the stage for identifying patterns and correlations among feedback.

Trend identification and prioritization

Once segments are coded, cross-analysis highlights recurring themes, contradictions, and major pain points. Occurrence counts aren’t the sole criterion: emotional intensity and business criticality also matter.

Insights are grouped by category (usability, content, communication, support) and prioritized based on their potential impact against initial objectives.

This synthesis yields a structured report with an issue map and operational recommendations. For example, you can prioritize backlog items.

Integration into product or marketing strategy

Focus group recommendations feed directly into the product roadmap, feature prioritization, and marketing positioning. They validate or invalidate analytics-driven hypotheses.

The project team can plan quick wins (minor tweaks) and strategic initiatives (journey overhauls, new module development) based on expected value.

This approach ensures decisions rely on a documented, nuanced understanding of needs rather than unsubstantiated impressions or internal consensus.

Turn your customer insights into a competitive advantage

The focus group is a powerful lever to enrich customer understanding and guide product or marketing evolution. By combining appropriate formats, rigorous preparation, and structured analysis, you can extract concrete, actionable learnings.

Edana positions itself as a strategic partner to support the planning, moderation, and exploitation of focus groups—whether ahead of a launch or during an optimization phase. Our experts help you translate qualitative feedback into solid, prioritized business directions.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert

PUBLISHED BY

David Mendes

Avatar de David Mendes

David is a Senior UX/UI Designer. He crafts user-centered journeys and interfaces for your business software, SaaS products, mobile applications, websites, and digital ecosystems. Leveraging user research and rapid prototyping expertise, he ensures a cohesive, engaging experience across every touchpoint.

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Featured-Post-UX-Design (EN) UI/UX Design EN

Design Thinking: Definition, Methodology and Concrete Benefits in Digital Innovation

Design Thinking: Definition, Methodology and Concrete Benefits in Digital Innovation

Auteur n°15 – David

In a context where digitalization has become a strategic imperative, Design Thinking proves to be an effective method for structuring innovation and avoiding the pitfalls of overly improvised workshops. This approach places the user at the heart of the process while ensuring coherence with technical constraints and business objectives. Swiss companies, facing global competition and high quality standards, find in it a framework to align all stakeholders. Through a proven methodology, it is possible to accelerate the creation of robust, scalable digital services and products tailored to the real needs of end users.

Design Thinking, a Structured Innovation Lever Beyond Brainstorming

Design Thinking is more than just a collection of ideas; it is a methodical process based on empathy and rapid testing. It brings together user, technological, and business dimensions to ensure relevant solutions.

Immersion and Empathy

The first phase focuses on gaining a deep understanding of the user context. Interviews, field observations, and active-listening workshops are organized to uncover motivations, frustrations, and latent needs. This participatory approach involves both business and IT teams from the outset, allowing multiple perspectives to intersect and preventing misunderstandings during the design phase.

Beyond standard personas, field immersions capture real usage patterns and operational constraints. The goal is not merely to collect data but to interpret subtle cues that will guide the rest of the project. This is where the relevance of the proposed digital solution is determined.

Thanks to this structured empathy, cognitive biases are minimized, allowing focus on genuine issues. The outputs of this phase are synthesized into empathy maps and user journeys, which serve as the guiding thread for all subsequent stages.

Problem Definition and Framing

After exploration, the challenge is to reformulate the problem in a precise, shared manner. The main “pain point” to be addressed is identified and measurable objectives are set. This formalization prevents scope creep and ensures clear alignment among IT teams, product management, and business units.

A structured problem definition is achieved through convergence workshops where each stakeholder validates scope and success criteria. Hypotheses are explicitly listed to steer future iterations and anticipate risks.

This stage transforms a general observation into a concrete, operational, and measurable challenge. It lays the groundwork for ideation and reduces the risk of delivering unnecessary or poorly suited features.

Ideation and Controlled Divergence

Next comes the ideation phase, where a wide range of ideas is generated without self-censorship. Sessions are paced with various techniques—from brainwriting to mind mapping—to stimulate collective creativity. The objective is to maximize the diversity of proposals.

To avoid dispersion, time and thematic constraints are imposed. Each idea is then evaluated based on technical feasibility, user value, and business impact. This prioritization matrix serves as a compass for selecting the most promising concepts.

The chosen ideas are sketched out in storyboards or low-fidelity wireframes. This mapping enables quick visualization of the future user journey and sets the stage for prototyping.

Example: A Swiss financial institution seeking to improve SME client onboarding identified a major pain point in manual data entry. Through a series of empathy and ideation workshops, it defined a new digital journey that included automatic document capture and real-time verification. This process reduced account opening time by 70% during the pilot.

Integrating Design Thinking into the Digital Strategy Process

Design Thinking structures the product journey from ideation to production, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. It fits within an agile, modular framework to accelerate innovation cycles.

Interdisciplinary Collaborative Work

In a digital transformation context, breaking down silos between design, IT, and business is essential. Design Thinking workshops bring these profiles together to ensure every viewpoint is considered, creating a true culture of co-creation.

Roles are clearly defined: a facilitator guides the sessions, a business expert provides process knowledge, and a product owner ensures alignment with business objectives. This setup balances creativity with rigor.

This way of working boosts team buy-in, as everyone feels invested in the project. Decisions are made with full awareness, reducing resistance to change and smoothing technical implementation.

Fast Iterations and Prototyping

A key advantage of Design Thinking is rapid prototyping. Low-fidelity mockups or proofs of concept are built with open source tools to test hypotheses. This velocity quickly reveals potential blockers.

Each iteration incorporates early user feedback. Adjustments are made in days without heavy development commitments. This minimizes resource waste and optimizes time-to-market.

The methodology is ideally complemented by CI/CD pipelines, ensuring continuous integration of validated prototypes. This approach reduces development costs and paves the way for scaling up to an industrial version.

Validation and User Testing

Before any large-scale deployment, testing sessions are held with a representative panel of users. Interactive prototypes are evaluated based on usability and ergonomics criteria.

Functional or ergonomic pain points are addressed at this stage, using both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Feedback is recorded in a prioritized backlog to guide subsequent development.

This approach guarantees the final solution meets real needs and minimizes post-launch rework, avoiding extra costs and loss of trust.

Example: A Swiss pharmaceutical lab adopted this approach to redesign its internal training portal. Prototype iterations tested with employees and quality managers refined the interface and reduced IT support queries by 50% during the national rollout.

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Concrete Benefits of Design Thinking Workshops for IT, Product, and Business Leaders

A well-structured Design Thinking workshop significantly reduces project risks and accelerates time-to-market. It also boosts stakeholder engagement and prioritizes high-ROI features.

Project Risk Reduction and Stakeholder Alignment

By involving all key actors from the start, a shared vision of scope and objectives is created. Hypotheses are validated before any development, reducing the risk of scope creep and costly rework.

This clarity strengthens governance, as decisions are documented and backed by user data. Trade-offs become quicker and more transparent for steering committees.

Over time, this discipline lowers the failure rate of digital projects and improves adaptability to changing contexts or strategies.

Accelerated Time-to-Market

Rapid prototyping and short cycles facilitate early production releases. Workshop-validated features can be industrialized in parallel thanks to a modular architecture and continuous integration pipelines.

This flexibility enables launching an MVP in weeks, gathering real feedback, and adjusting the product roadmap. Companies thus gain weeks or even months on the initial schedule.

This agility is a decisive competitive advantage in fast-evolving markets.

End-User Engagement and Adoption

Including future users in workshops fosters co-creation. They feel heard and see their needs addressed. This generates buy-in and eases adoption of digital solutions.

Training materials and documentation can be developed from initial user feedback, reducing post-launch support needs and improving the onboarding experience.

In the long run, the company gains a base of ambassador users ready to promote the solution internally and externally.

Example: A Romandy-based real estate company used Design Thinking to revamp its online client portal. Agile management and user testing increased digital account activation by 30% while cutting customer service calls for interface assistance by 40%.

Informed Technology Choices and Robust Software Architecture through Design Thinking

Design Thinking guides technology choices toward modular, open source, and hybrid solutions to avoid vendor lock-in. It also steers the definition of a scalable, secure architecture.

Modular and Scalable Architecture

Mapping user journeys and features identifies critical domains to isolate into microservices. This granularity simplifies maintenance, scalability, and independent evolution of each component.

Such architecture limits the impact of incidents and streamlines version upgrades. It relies on containers and orchestrators to ensure optimal resilience and flexibility.

By adopting this modularity from ideation onward, future needs are anticipated, building a digital foundation that can evolve without a complete overhaul.

Selection of Suitable Open Source Components

Design Thinking can also include technology evaluation during ideation. Mature open source solutions with strong communities and regular updates are favored.

This approach reduces dependency on a single vendor and offers customization freedom. Libraries are chosen based on business alignment and technical compatibility.

Processes for monitoring and automated updates are implemented to ensure long-term sustainability and security of the stack.

Hybridization and Avoiding Vendor Lock-In

To meet specific constraints, existing components can be combined with from-scratch development. This hybrid approach retains the agility of off-the-shelf solutions while ensuring precise customization.

Interfaces are standardized via open APIs, making future component replacement seamless. The ecosystem remains flexible, modular, and adaptable to strategic shifts.

Clear governance over contracts, licenses, and data exchange completes this approach to control total cost of ownership and mitigate lock-in risks.

Example: A Swiss retail group re-architected its e-commerce platform through a Design Thinking approach, decoupling the product catalog, promotions engine, and payment system. This open source–based modularity enabled 200% load growth during promotional peaks without major incidents.

Design Thinking: Make It the Accelerator of Your Digital Innovation

Design Thinking provides a robust framework to ideate, prototype, and industrialize user-centered digital solutions while integrating technological and business challenges from the start. It strengthens collaboration, accelerates innovation cycles, and reduces project risk through early validation.

This method also guides architectural and technology decisions toward modular, open source, and hybrid ecosystems, ensuring solution scalability and resilience. IT, product, and business leaders thus benefit from optimal alignment and shortened time-to-market.

CIOs, CTOs, CEOs, and product managers looking to transform ideas into high-performance digital projects will find in this approach a powerful lever to maximize ROI and anticipate future developments.

At Edana, our experts are available to support you in setting up tailored Design Thinking workshops and structuring your digital innovation process.

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David Mendes

Avatar de David Mendes

David is a Senior UX/UI Designer. He crafts user-centered journeys and interfaces for your business software, SaaS products, mobile applications, websites, and digital ecosystems. Leveraging user research and rapid prototyping expertise, he ensures a cohesive, engaging experience across every touchpoint.

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Product Design vs UX Design: Understanding the Roles to Build a High-Performing Digital Product

Product Design vs UX Design: Understanding the Roles to Build a High-Performing Digital Product

Auteur n°15 – David

In an ecosystem where every design decision impacts the success of a digital product, distinguishing product design from UX design is essential for structuring a project and optimizing resources. These two disciplines, often conflated, have complementary goals: one focuses on product strategy and alignment with business objectives, the other on user experience and ergonomics. By clarifying their responsibilities and establishing clear collaboration processes, companies reduce the risk of misunderstandings and accelerate time-to-market.

Clarifying Roles: From Business Needs to User Experience

Product design defines the overall vision, positioning, and priorities of the product. UX design focuses on interactions, ergonomics, and end-user satisfaction.

Product Design: Vision and Prioritization

The product designer initiates strategic thinking by identifying market opportunities and aligning the roadmap with business objectives. Based on market research and competitive analysis, they structure features into successive phases, prioritizing those with the highest ROI impact. This approach relies on clear metrics (development cost, value delivered, technical risks).

At the core of their role, the product designer also defines the product’s positioning, unique value proposition, and target customer segments. They formalize personas and usage scenarios to guide functional decisions and prevent scope creep during development. This structuring avoids late-stage trade-offs and ensures alignment with the company’s strategy.

UX Design: User-Centered Research and Prototypes

The UX designer, for their part, adopts a user-centered approach from the initial scoping workshops. They conduct interviews, user tests, and co-creation workshops to understand needs, frustrations, and behaviors. These insights inform the creation of wireframes, user journeys, and interactive prototypes.

Each prototype is evaluated through usability testing, enabling rapid identification of friction points and interface adjustments before any heavy development. By conducting multiple short iterations, the UX designer ensures fine-tuned adaptation to real expectations and avoids producing irrelevant or misunderstood features.

Governance and Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

To ensure seamless collaboration, product and UX designers co-create the specifications: the product designer contributes the functional vision, the UX designer the user perspective. Joint reviews and shared milestones validate both business value and interaction quality.

An agile governance, where both profiles participate in the same rituals (sprint planning, sprint reviews, retrospectives), fosters continuous exchange. Decisions are then made through a dual lens, ensuring both strategic coherence and ergonomic efficiency.

Concrete Example of Separation Between Product Designer and UX Designer

A Swiss industrial company approached us to launch a B2B spare parts ordering platform. Our product designer developed a value proposition canvas prioritizing order speed and stock transparency, while the UX designer conducted workshops with field operators to create a simplified three-step navigation flow. This coordinated approach reduced average order processing time by 30% even at the MVP stage.

Complementarity: From Ideation to Product Validation

When product design and UX design work in concert, the digital platform ensures both business relevance and user adoption. Their cross-disciplinary methodologies accelerate hypothesis validation and optimize investments.

From Product Research to User Testing

The product designer formalizes value hypotheses to test: revenue impact, adoption by key segments, potential for upmarket growth. Each hypothesis is turned into proto-hypotheses to be validated by the UX designer through qualitative and quantitative studies.

User testing (A/B testing, moderated tests, heatmaps) provides objective data to adjust the roadmap. It enables quickly discarding low-efficiency features and reinvesting in higher-value levers.

Iterative Prototyping and Continuous Feedback

A low-fidelity prototype sketches the information architecture, while a high-fidelity prototype refines visual design and micro-interactions. At each iteration, user feedback is integrated into the backlog, feeding product prioritization.

This iterative loop reduces the risk of overdevelopment and encourages the market release of progressive versions, validated at each step by a representative panel.

KPI Alignment and Usage Monitoring

To monitor impact, product and UX designers jointly define key indicators (task completion rate, Net Promoter Score, generated revenue). Analytics and session replay tools provide continuous field feedback.

Usage data guides trade-offs, ensuring the product’s evolution is performance-driven while keeping user satisfaction at the core of decisions.

Concrete Example of Complementarity Between UX Design and Product Design

A Swiss financial services group adopted this approach for its mobile portfolio management app. Product and UX designers conducted moderated session tests, revealing that 40% of testers stalled at the strong authentication step. Thanks to these insights, the team pivoted to a more elegant biometric solution and increased the service activation rate by 25%.

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Adapting Profiles to the Digital Project Lifecycle

At the MVP stage, flexibility is key: favor a product designer who can quickly validate hypotheses and a UX designer focused on lean research. During the scale phase, reinforce teams to structure growth and ensure a consistent experience across all channels.

MVP: Agility and Rapid Validation

When launching an MVP, the goal is to test key hypotheses with a minimal set of features. The product designer focuses on defining these essential features and developing a batch-based roadmap, while the UX designer conducts rapid tests (guerilla testing, paper prototyping) to validate intuitiveness.

This lean setup allows for feedback gathering within weeks and iteration without burdening the structure. Decisions are based on tangible results rather than speculation.

Scale: Structuring and Standardization

Once the MVP is validated, the challenge is to prepare for scale and ensure cross-channel consistency. The product designer broadens the product vision, refines the roadmap, and introduces governance processes (feature reviews, scoring-based prioritization). The UX designer documents UI/UX guidelines and establishes a modular component library to standardize interfaces.

Integrating design systems enhances development speed and facilitates continuous evolution while adhering to a unified visual and interaction language.

Redesign: Expertise and Controlled Transition

In a redesign, the goal is to modernize an existing solution while preserving the user base. The product designer conducts a functional audit and defines a roadmap to migrate critical features without service disruption. The UX designer maps aging journeys, identifies breakpoints, and proposes new interaction patterns.

This phased approach, supported by coordinated iterations, ensures a smooth transition and minimizes impact on satisfaction and adoption.

Aligning Product and UX Design in a Digital Agency

An experienced agency organizes its teams to provide cross-functional product leadership, from defining features to validating with users. It combines agile methodologies, open-source solutions, and a modular ecosystem to ensure performance and scalability.

Overall Scoping and Technical-Functional Roadmap

At kickoff, the agency facilitates multidisciplinary workshops where product and UX designers work with business stakeholders to formalize the vision, objectives, and project milestones. Deliverables include a prioritized backlog and a concrete action plan, aligned with business imperatives and technical constraints.

This initial scoping can be built around open-source blocks and modular microservices to minimize vendor lock-in and ensure the application’s long-term scalability and flexibility.

Prototyping, Testing, and Rapid Iterations

The agency develops interactive prototypes that integrate reusable components, then coordinates testing sessions with representative users. Each finding is documented and prioritized with the product designer to adjust the roadmap.

This iterative approach, based on concrete feedback, limits development waste and ensures functional relevance before significant cost commitments.

Scaling Up and Continuous Monitoring

During deployment, the agency structures an evolving support system: test automation, UX and business KPI monitoring, incremental updates. Product and UX designers remain involved to manage releases and ensure experience consistency as new features are added.

The modularity of the architecture and use of open-source stacks (light front-end, asynchronous APIs, containers) ensure controlled scaling and prevent future bottlenecks.

Concrete Example

An emerging Swiss services company entrusted us with a complete redesign of its B2C platform. The plan was divided into three phases: scoping, A/B-tested prototype validation, and deployment with an Angular-based design system. The iterative cycle allowed for monthly user feedback integration, reducing churn by 18% in six months while adhering to the initial schedule.

Build a High-Performing, Aligned Digital Product

By clearly distinguishing product design and UX design and orchestrating them collaboratively, you maximize business impact and user adoption. The project’s maturity levels—MVP, scale, redesign—dictate the design team’s composition and intensity, while a modular, open-source approach ensures scalability and longevity.

Whatever your context, our Edana experts are ready to support you in designing a digital solution that combines strategy, experience, and technological robustness.

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PUBLISHED BY

David Mendes

Avatar de David Mendes

David is a Senior UX/UI Designer. He crafts user-centered journeys and interfaces for your business software, SaaS products, mobile applications, websites, and digital ecosystems. Leveraging user research and rapid prototyping expertise, he ensures a cohesive, engaging experience across every touchpoint.

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Digital Accessibility: How AI Paves the Way to an Inclusive Experience for All

Digital Accessibility: How AI Paves the Way to an Inclusive Experience for All

Auteur n°2 – Jonathan

Despite decades of guidelines and standards, a significant portion of the web remains difficult to access for people with disabilities. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the landscape by automating content analysis and correction, personalizing the user experience, and paving the way for multisensory interactions. IT directors, project managers, or CIOs: it’s time to integrate AI into your accessibility strategy to meet legal requirements, societal expectations, and the needs of an aging population, all while delivering an optimized experience for every user.

Why Digital Accessibility Has Become Strategic Today

Regulations are evolving rapidly while societal expectations intensify. At the same time, aging populations and the proliferation of mobile usage place accessibility at the heart of business challenges.

Strengthening Legal Obligations (EU, Switzerland, US)

Since the adoption of European Directive 2016/2102, public websites and apps must comply with WCAG 2.1 standards. This legislation mandates color contrasts, textual alternatives, and fully functional keyboard navigation. In Switzerland, the Federal Act on the Elimination of Discrimination against Persons with Disabilities (LHand) and its ordinance specify similar requirements for digital services of administrations and companies subject to public procurement.

In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is increasingly invoked to sue organizations whose digital interfaces are not accessible. Class actions are on the rise, with fines and remediation costs reaching into the hundreds of thousands of francs.

This regulatory tightening is most visible in the financial sector and public services, where controls and sanctions are systematic. Companies failing to comply not only risk penalties but also damage to their reputation.

Growing Social Pressure and Collective Actions

Social media amplify the voices of people with disabilities, turning an accessibility incident into an immediate viral backlash. A malfunctioning voice-command interface can quickly become the focus of online petitions and criticism.

At the same time, associations and digital rights collectives conduct investigations and file group complaints. In Europe, several major organizations have already been forced to overhaul their portals under threat of administrative blockages.

This social pressure also translates into tenders that now include accessibility as a selection criterion. Early adopters gain visibility and trust among partners and clients.

Aging Population and Widespread Mobile Usage

Switzerland has over 18% of seniors aged 65 and above, a figure set to grow in the coming years. Visual, auditory, or motor impairments therefore become strategic issues for capturing this clientele.

Moreover, usage is increasingly mobile: smaller interfaces, touch gestures, and varied contexts of use (lighting, movement). Temporary impairments—broken screens, occupied hands, noisy environments—affect a growing number of users every day.

In this context, a major Swiss retailer tested a dynamic enlargement tool for click zones on its mobile site. Thanks to AI algorithms, interactive areas adjust in real time to how the user holds their phone, reducing input errors by 35% among those over 60.

What AI Can Concretely Transform in Accessibility

AI opens new horizons: automation, personalization, and real-time adaptation. From generating captions to creating multisensory experiences, AI expands the scope of inclusion efforts.

Automatic Generation of Captions, Summaries, and Image Descriptions

Speech recognition and natural language processing solutions transcribe video dialogue instantly, producing synchronized captions. An AI algorithm can also automatically summarize long content, easing reading for people with dyslexia or visual impairments.

Image descriptions, long created manually, can now be generated by computer vision. Each image or illustration receives a detailed alt text, ensuring equivalent comprehension for screen reader users.

For a Swiss e-learning institution, this mechanism reduced the time spent on creating accessible content by 80%. Video courses now come with instant captions and summaries, boosting satisfaction for all learners.

Real-Time Translation and Adaptation (Audio, Visual, Text)

AI-based machine translation services now deliver subtitles comparable to a professional’s. Content can be adapted into over 100 languages, with style and phrasing tailored to technical or marketing contexts.

In audio interfaces, a voice assistant can rephrase responses for hard-of-hearing users, adding on-screen text or offering haptic feedback. This multimodality enriches the experience.

In multilingual settings—trade shows, international training, global platforms—these tools ensure consistent accessibility without additional localization costs.

Automated Website Audits

Intelligent crawlers continuously scan web pages to detect WCAG or RGAA violations. They generate detailed reports, prioritized by business impact and technical severity.

Paired with interactive dashboards, these audits enable progress tracking, fix planning, and ROI quantification for accessibility actions.

A Swiss industrial multinational implemented a daily automated audit. Detected anomalies feed directly into its ITSM tool, ensuring traceability and faster response.

Adaptive Interfaces for Temporary or Situational Impairments

Machine learning allows interfaces to detect noisy environments and automatically offer text transcriptions of audio notifications.

If ambient light is low, AI adjusts contrast and font size in real time to preserve visual comfort.

These contextual adaptations improve the experience for all users without manual configuration overload.

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Limits Not to Ignore: Why AI Alone Is Not Enough for Optimal Accessibility

AI delivers considerable gains, but it cannot replace a comprehensive accessibility approach. Manual testing, quality data, and inclusive design remain indispensable pillars.

Manual Testing Remains Indispensable

Algorithms can miss nuances, such as coherence in descriptive language. User testing, by contrast, exposes the frustrations experienced by people with disabilities.

Validations with screen readers and assistive devices must be conducted regularly, especially during major redesigns or updates.

A Swiss financial institution maintained a panel of employees with disabilities to test every major portal version. These human insights corrected 12% of issues undetected by automated tools.

By combining AI with field feedback, organizations achieve a level of excellence unattainable by either approach alone.

The Quality of Training Data Is Crucial

Computer vision models are only as good as the annotated images that train them. A biased or insufficient dataset leads to inaccurate or discriminatory descriptions.

Algorithms must be fed representative data covering all profiles and use cases, ensuring diversity of genders, ages, and disability types.

Data governance—collection, anonymization, updates—must be rigorous to guarantee results that are reliable and GDPR-compliant.

Without quality data, AI can hinder rather than accelerate, generating costly errors that require manual correction.

Need for Accessible Design from the UX/UI Phase

Before integrating AI, information architecture and user journeys must be crafted to minimize entry barriers.

Structuring HTML code, providing semantic landmarks, and adopting accessible components (ARIA buttons, visual cues) ensure a solid foundation.

AI tools will enrich this base but cannot compensate for interfaces built without these principles.

A Swiss public services agency tested several AI widgets before realizing that unclear navigation elements limited adoption. A prior UX redesign tripled the effectiveness of the assistive tools.

Adopting a Contextual and Scalable Approach for AI-Centered Accessibility

Each accessibility project must be based on a tailored, modular, and secure strategy. Open source, hybrid modules, and scalable architecture ensure sustainable inclusion.

Favor Open Source Solutions and Avoid Vendor Lock-In

Open source libraries offer full flexibility and an active community to quickly address vulnerabilities.

By controlling code and dependencies, organizations ensure the longevity and security of accessibility tools without being subject to a single vendor’s roadmap.

This approach aligns with Edana’s culture, where each component is chosen for its ecosystem and ability to evolve without blockage.

Integrate Accessibility from the Digital Product Design Phase

Ideation and prototyping workshops should involve designers, accessibility experts, and AI developers to define native accessible components.

Technical and usability feasibility tests occur before development to avoid costly retrofits.

A Swiss logistics services company co-created its interfaces with a diverse user panel, guaranteeing WCAG compliance and easing later AI tool integration.

Implement Continuous Auditing and Monitoring

Beyond an initial audit, an automated monitoring system must continually check for accessibility regressions.

AI-generated reports feed a backlog that prioritizes fixes by business impact and technical criticality.

This process ensures iterative improvement and prevents compliance drift as features evolve.

Train Teams and Establish Agile Governance

Developers and project managers must understand accessibility challenges and master associated AI tools.

Regular training and inclusive code reviews maintain a high, shared skill level.

Agile governance, with sprints dedicated to accessibility topics, ensures transparent management and continuous value delivery.

Make Accessibility a Lever of Competitiveness

By combining regulatory compliance, AI’s potential, sound design practices, and agile governance, you create an inclusive and differentiating digital experience. When fueled by quality data and supported by human testing, artificial intelligence becomes a powerful accelerator of inclusion.

In a market where compliance is a prerequisite and user experience a key success factor, integrating accessibility from the outset and enhancing it with advanced technologies is a strategic choice. Our experts are here to help you define the most suitable solution for your context, prioritizing scalability, security, and open source.

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PUBLISHED BY

Jonathan Massa

As a specialist in digital consulting, strategy and execution, Jonathan advises organizations on strategic and operational issues related to value creation and digitalization programs focusing on innovation and organic growth. Furthermore, he advises our clients on software engineering and digital development issues to enable them to mobilize the right solutions for their goals.

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Do You Really Need to Draft a Specification Document for Your Digital Project?

Do You Really Need to Draft a Specification Document for Your Digital Project?

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

Drafting a comprehensive specification document is often regarded as the cornerstone of any digital project. Yet this bulky document can sometimes create gaps between actual needs and initial specifications, weigh down decision-making processes, and slow your teams’ responsiveness. For decision-makers seeking a SaaS solution, a mobile app, business software, or a digital platform, the challenge is to balance agility with discipline. This guide proposes moving beyond the myth of the specification document as a mandatory step by prioritizing collaboration, rapid concept visualization (design-first), and strategic prioritization. With this approach, you quickly define a relevant MVP, focus your resources on delivering real value, and significantly reduce your time-to-market. We illustrate each point with concrete examples from Swiss companies to inspire your strategy.

The Limitations of the Traditional Specification Document

The specification document can sometimes become a too-rigid foundation, incapable of evolving in response to field discoveries. Its creation mobilizes significant resources before the first prototypes even exist, risking an unnecessary extension of your time-to-market.

Rigid Specifications

The specification document sets an exhaustive framework from the outset, detailing every feature, user scenario, and technical constraint. But this approach doesn’t always incorporate insights from early feedback or user testing.

When new requirements emerge, integrating them demands formal revisions, approval cycles, and extra meetings. Each change becomes a project in itself.

Ultimately, this approach can leave the project trapped in dated specification lists, ignoring evolving business needs or market opportunities.

Approval Delays and Time-to-Market

Drafting and approving the specification document often involves multiple countries and departments, generating back-and-forth exchanges and unexpected delays. Scoping meetings pile up, slowing decision-making.

The delays accumulated before development even begins directly impact time-to-market, reducing the company’s ability to seize early opportunities.

This can trigger a domino effect, where a delayed launch of an application or digital platform benefits your more agile competitors.

Lack of Stakeholder Buy-In

Engaging end users, marketing teams, or operations too late in a fixed document reduces their commitment. Stakeholders may perceive the specification as imposed, without real consideration for their specific needs.

Without collective ownership, stakeholders may not engage in testing or validation phases, resulting in late feedback and costly revisions at the end of the project.

For example, a mid-sized Swiss watchmaker spent over three months finalizing its customer platform specification. During the acceptance phase, internal teams flagged major gaps, necessitating two redefinition cycles. The project was pushed back six months, impacting the marketing schedule and user satisfaction.

Risks of a Specification Document: When Formalism Stifles Innovation

The need to comply with a strict specification can suffocate creativity and risk-taking. Obsessing over initial details often disconnects the project from the market’s actual and fluid needs.

Blocking Emerging Ideas

The specification document defines features before any user exploration or design sprint has even been conducted. This rigid anticipation limits the emergence of innovative ideas discovered during product discovery.

When new concepts appear, they’re often deemed out of scope, requiring amendments or budget renegotiations. Teams become reluctant to propose alternative approaches.

As a result, the project stalls on preconceived solutions, missing out on collective intelligence and on-the-ground feedback.

Disconnect from Real User Needs

A static document cannot capture the dynamic evolution of user needs or emerging usage patterns. The personas and use cases initially described quickly become obsolete.

Without regular feedback, development rests on assumptions, increasing the risk of delivering non-priority or poorly adopted features.

This disconnect often leads to low adoption rates and business teams feeling alienated from technological decisions.

Hidden Cost of Rigorous Compliance

Ensuring compliance with the specification document requires tools and monitoring processes (committees, reports, acceptance tests). These resources can account for up to 20% of a digital project’s total budget.

Teams spend more time in meetings and reporting than on development and innovation. Cushions to satisfy every line of the document drag down velocity.

A Swiss financial institution preparing an internal portal found that 18% of its project budget was consumed by validation committees and change management. This overrun delayed the launch and increased the TCO.

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Collaboration and Design-First: An Alternative Approach

Co-design and design-first workshops align business needs and technical solutions. Rapid prototyping enables continuous experimentation, validation, and refinement before any large-scale development.

UX and Design Thinking Workshops

Workshops bring business teams, IT, and end users together around a whiteboard. This rapid pooling of ideas fosters mutual understanding and identification of real priorities.

In just a few hours, teams generate empirical user journeys, test hypotheses, and refine functional requirements before formalizing anything in writing.

This collective engagement builds co-ownership and ensures better buy-in during later development phases.

Rapid Prototyping to Validate Concepts

A clickable prototype or interactive wireframe lets you envision the final product without writing a single line of code. Feedback is immediate and easy to integrate.

Adjustments happen in real time, drastically reducing revision cycles compared to textual specification feedback.

In practice, teams quickly identify misunderstood flows, secondary features, and friction points before any heavy budget commitment.

Iterative Feedback and Continuous Refinement

Based on the prototype, sprints follow with frequent demos to stakeholders. Each iteration progressively enriches the truly useful scope.

This Lean product approach ensures the project stays connected to business objectives and field realities, avoiding variances from initial assumptions.

A Swiss pharmaceutical company used this approach to overhaul its internal training portal. In three successive workshops, it invalidated two secondary features and focused development on an interactive reporting module, cutting the backlog by 40% by the MVP stage.

Strategic Prioritization and Launching an Agile MVP

Defining an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) focuses efforts on the most critical business value. A lightweight governance model ensures agile management, ROI orientation, and continuous adaptation.

Product Discovery and Lean Roadmap

The product discovery phase merges user insights, market data, and technical constraints to rank features. Prioritization workshops (MoSCoW, Kano) guide decisions.

A Lean roadmap is built, segmented into short releases aligned with business strategy, avoiding exhaustive specification gathering.

This balance of long-term vision and quick iterations supports agility while ensuring overall project coherence.

Defining a Value-Driven MVP

The MVP concentrates development on features essential to validate key hypotheses: user acquisition, engagement, and retention.

This approach mitigates financial and technical risk by testing the product’s relevance early on a limited segment.

A retail chain launched its mobile app as an MVP in three months. It validated the basic ordering flow before investing in the advanced payment module, optimizing resources and limiting initial investment.

Agile Management and Lightweight Governance

The project is tracked via a single product backlog, fueled by prioritized user stories reviewed each sprint. Performance indicators (KPIs, OKRs) measure the real impact of new features.

Lightweight governance relies on short rituals (stand-up, sprint review, retrospective) and transparent communication between IT, business teams, and vendors. This replaces the multi-monthly committees of the classic specification approach.

Adjustments are made continuously, allowing course corrections at the first sign of deviation, without waiting for the end of a traditional specification phase.

Launch Your Digital Project by Unleashing Innovation

The specification document remains useful for aligning stakeholders on an initial vision, but its formality must not hinder creativity or responsiveness. By combining co-design workshops, rapid prototyping, and a value-focused MVP, you optimize development cycles, reduce risks, and engage your teams from the first deliverables.

Whether you’re steering a process transformation, launching a SaaS, a business tool, or creating a mobile app, our Edana experts will support you in adapting this agile, context-driven approach to your business challenges. They’ll help you harness collective intelligence and deploy a scalable, secure solution perfectly aligned with your strategy.

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PUBLISHED BY

Mariami Minadze

Mariami is an expert in digital strategy and project management. She audits the digital presences of companies and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, and orchestrates strategies and plans that generate value for our customers. Highlighting and piloting solutions tailored to your objectives for measurable results and maximum ROI is her specialty.

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Design System: The Backbone of Your Digital Products

Design System: The Backbone of Your Digital Products

Auteur n°15 – David

In a context where portals, applications and platforms are multiplying their features, visual and functional consistency becomes a major challenge for IT and business departments. A structured Design System is much more than a simple collection of graphical components: it establishes shared governance, promotes controlled evolution and secures the user experience across all digital products. Adopting this approach from the design phase ensures controlled scalability and greater responsiveness to business needs. This article details the fundamentals, implementation and strategic benefits of a product-oriented Design System, to transform this technical foundation into a performance lever.

The Design System, More Than Just a Component Library

The Design System is above all a digital governance framework that promotes consistency and reuse. It defines rules, principles and processes that ensure visual and functional unity across all products.

What Is a Design System?

The Design System brings together a set of UI components, styles (typography, color palette) and usage guidelines documented in a centralized manner. It serves as the single source of truth for all teams involved in creating and evolving digital interfaces.

This system also incorporates accessibility guidelines, responsive design and ergonomics, ensuring a consistent user journey regardless of the channel or device used. It helps limit graphical and functional deviations throughout development.

Its adoption accelerates time-to-market by avoiding redundant decision-making with each new feature. By standardizing patterns, it provides a trusted foundation for delivering reliable products quickly.

Components and Strategic Roles of the Design System

Beyond visual components, the Design System includes tokens (colors, spacing, typography) and systemic design principles that guide the creation of new modules. Each token is versioned to manage evolutions without breaking existing implementations.

It serves as a digital governance tool, centralizing decisions and best practices. UX/UI charters and technical guidelines are structured around a shared repository, ensuring smooth iterations between design and development.

With comprehensive documentation and validation processes, the Design System stabilizes the digital ecosystem. Responsibilities are clarified: a steering committee approves changes, while business teams focus on functional value.

Governance and Scalability

A sustainable Design System relies on agile governance. Roles are distributed among designers, developers and business stakeholders, each bringing their expertise to enrich the repository.

Updates follow a planned cycle: recommendations and component evolutions are reviewed and tested in isolated environments before production deployment. This rigor minimizes the risk of incompatibility.

The modularity of the Design System ensures controlled scalability. New projects can gradually integrate existing components and tokens while retaining the freedom to add business-specific features without compromising overall consistency.

Concrete Example of a Design System

A mid-sized Swiss banking institution consolidated its customer portal by creating an internal open source Design System. The team structured color tokens around the internal ESG charter, defined standard components for forms and introduced a CI/CD pipeline to publish each version. The result: a 40% reduction in graphic design time and a consistent experience despite the proliferation of modules (account management, credit simulation, customer support).

The Design System: a Lever for Consistency and Scalability in Digital Ecosystems

Implementing a Design System ensures a uniform experience across all digital touchpoints. It provides a modular architecture capable of scaling without adding complexity.

Ensuring Cross-Product Consistency

In a multi-product context, visual and functional consistency builds user trust and simplifies onboarding. Navigation, form and notification patterns are standardized, reducing cognitive load.

Each team accesses a centralized library, avoiding duplication and reducing the risk of inconsistencies. Charter updates propagate automatically via versioning and delivery automation.

This also simplifies onboarding new team members: the single repository serves as the reference documentation for understanding the UI ecosystem and its usage rules, accelerating their learning curve.

Technical and Organizational Scalability

Design System components are packaged as reusable modules within a package manager (npm, NuGet, Maven). Each module contains associated styles, scripts and tests, ensuring effortless integration.

Updates are managed through an explicit dependency mechanism: projects consume only validated and secure versions, avoiding unexpected fluctuations. Continuous integration runs regression tests on each component.

On the organizational side, governance is tailored to needs: a multidisciplinary committee oversees evolutions, while product squads can propose new patterns validated by the central repository.

Guided Evolutions and Secure by Design

An internal open source approach promotes transparency of contributions and traceability of changes. Pull requests undergo cross-review, involving designers, engineers and security architects.

Guidelines include security rules (focus management, constraints on third-party dependencies, WCAG accessibility) to ensure optimal coverage from the design phase.

Modularity facilitates the removal or rapid update of any component in case of a detected vulnerability, minimizing the impact on the overall ecosystem.

Concrete Example of a Design System Delivering Consistency

An industrial manufacturer in the Lake Geneva region consolidated three intranet solutions into a single portal. The Design System enabled merging UI libraries, streamlining components and deploying a common framework based on React and Storybook. The industrialization of updates reduced security patch integration time by 60% and ensured visual consistency between production monitoring, maintenance and reporting modules.

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Facilitating Cross-Functional Collaboration and Optimizing Productivity

A structured Design System serves as a common language between UX/UI designers, developers, Product Owners and business teams. This shared foundation streamlines communication and accelerates feature delivery.

Aligning Teams Around the Product

The Design System serves as a reference for defining user stories and acceptance tests, as well as designing the user story map. Each new feature relies on proven components, reducing areas of uncertainty.

Co-design workshops use the repository as a starting point, enabling rapid prototyping and validation of choices before development.

The backlog now includes tickets dedicated to enriching or revising the Design System, ensuring continuous governance and ongoing improvement of the common foundation.

Reducing Back-and-Forth and Ambiguity with a Clear, Reliable Design System

With a dynamic, interactive style guide, developers access specifications (dimensions, behaviors, states) directly without repeated exchanges with designers.

Brief changes are tracked in the documentation, ensuring transparency on the history of decisions and avoiding misunderstandings.

Design System versioning and release note management provide clear visibility on new features and fixes.

Accelerated Onboarding and Skill Development

By standardizing the component repository, every newcomer immediately finds all patterns and best practices. A dedicated starter guide illustrates the most common usage scenarios.

Internal workshops and pair designing sessions rely on the Storybook environment, where use cases are showcased. Technical and UX skills spread quickly.

This rapid adoption increases team productivity and reduces dependence on experts, freeing up time for functional innovation.

Concrete Example of a Design System Improving Internal Collaboration

An e-commerce platform for a Swiss retailer integrated a Design System from the redesign phase. Sprints systematically included component refresh and documentation tasks. Collaboration via the Storybook environment reduced UI-related QA feedback by 50% and enabled continuous deployment with fewer visual incidents in production.

Cost Reduction and Sustainable Adoption Thanks to a Solid Product Vision

Applying the Design System with a product mindset ensures sustainable governance and long-term ROI. Evolutionary maintenance becomes predictable and economically controlled.

Maintenance Cost Control

Centralizing components reduces the number of ad hoc developments and undocumented extensions. Bug fixes and updates propagate automatically to all projects consuming the repository.

Systematic reuse minimizes resources devoted to creating new modules, and partial refactoring efforts are limited to token adjustments rather than complete rewrites.

IT budgets stabilize, operating costs become more predictable and teams can anticipate evolutions without surprises.

Onboarding and Continuous Training

A starter kit guides Product Owners and project managers in integrating the Design System into any new build. CI/CD workflows include automatic validations for guideline compliance.

Targeted training and living documentation promote a gradual skill upgrade for teams, limiting external needs and ensuring repository sustainability.

Each iteration includes a Design System review phase, ensuring alignment with business objectives and product portfolio evolution.

Implementation with a Product Vision

Instead of treating the Design System as a mere project deliverable, it becomes a product in its own right, driven by a dedicated roadmap. KPIs (reuse rate, development time, compliance rate) are tracked to measure generated value.

Product ownership is entrusted to a cross-functional group responsible for prioritizing evolutions, organizing user tests, and validating component performance in real-world conditions.

The product approach ensures continuous improvement, increased maturity and adaptation of the Design System to emerging challenges (internationalization, theming, enhanced accessibility).

Concrete Example

A Swiss insurance group launched a product vision dedicated to its Design System. A Product Manager was appointed, with an annual budget allocated to component innovation. Each quarter, IT and design teams publish releases, document evolutions and measure the impact on time-to-production. Maintenance costs decreased by 30% in one year, while internal satisfaction rates exceeded 85%.

Make the Design System a Pillar of Your Digital Transformation

The Design System proves to be a strategic lever for consistency, scalability and productivity across any digital ecosystem. It ensures shared governance, significantly reduces maintenance costs and accelerates the integration of new features. By adopting a product approach, this evolving repository becomes a genuine long-term business asset.

Whether it’s an internal portal, a customer platform or a network of applications, its structured implementation secures future evolutions while freeing up time for innovation.

At Edana, our experts support organizations in the design, governance and deployment of powerful Design Systems tailored to each business context. Get in touch with them now to discuss your objectives and needs and co-create adapted, sustainable solutions.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert

PUBLISHED BY

David Mendes

Avatar de David Mendes

David is a Senior UX/UI Designer. He crafts user-centered journeys and interfaces for your business software, SaaS products, mobile applications, websites, and digital ecosystems. Leveraging user research and rapid prototyping expertise, he ensures a cohesive, engaging experience across every touchpoint.

Categories
Digital Consultancy & Business (EN) Featured-Post-UX-Design (EN)

Should You Create an MVP? Benefits, Pitfalls to Avoid, and an Effective Design Method

Should You Create an MVP? Benefits, Pitfalls to Avoid, and an Effective Design Method

Auteur n°15 – David

In an environment where the pressure to innovate and mitigate risks is constant, the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) emerges as a strategic lever for quickly testing an idea before committing significant resources. Although it’s often perceived as a mere “lightweight” version, a well-crafted MVP meets rigorous criteria and emphasizes essential business value. IT decision-makers, digital transformation leaders, and executive teams will find in this article a comprehensive guide to distinguish what an MVP truly is, understand its stakes, assess its benefits, and anticipate its pitfalls in order to launch a digital project on solid foundations.

Understanding the MVP: Definition and Distinctions

The MVP is the simplest version of a product that allows you to quickly verify market fit. It is neither an exploratory prototype nor a technical PoC but a user-focused tool.It aims to collect concrete feedback to effectively prioritize future developments.

MVP vs Proof of Concept (PoC)

The PoC (Proof of Concept) primarily seeks to validate the technical feasibility of an idea or technology. It answers the question “Is it possible?” by isolating a use case or technical module without necessarily integrating the full user experience.

By contrast, the MVP targets end users directly to test the product’s appeal in the real market. It includes only the minimal features necessary to generate user feedback and measure the attractiveness of the value proposition.

While a PoC can be entirely internal and aimed at technical teams, the MVP is deployed to a sample of target customers or users, providing concrete business validation metrics or adjustments to plan.

MVP vs Prototype

A prototype serves to illustrate ergonomics and user flows without offering a truly functional service. It can be static or interactive but does not handle real data or end-to-end processes.

The MVP, on the other hand, relies on an operational architecture and manages real use cases. It collects actionable data, identifies friction points, and tests strategic hypotheses about delivered value.

The key difference lies in activating a feedback loop and the ability to derive quantitative and qualitative insights on usage, whereas a prototype remains a conversational aid for gathering initial opinions.

MVP and “Minimalist Version” Do Not Mean a Half-Done Product

An MVP should not be mistaken for an unfinished product or a “low-cost version.” Its deliverables must meet quality, security, and usability criteria sufficient to provide a robust first experience.

Neglecting quality or UX risks generating biased or negative feedback that does not reflect the true value of the offering. An MVP must be built on a modular, scalable, and secure architecture to support future expansion.

Rigor applied from the MVP stage ensures future performance: by choosing an open-source, extensible, and well-documented structure, you reduce technical debt and prepare subsequent iterations without blockage.

Example: A mid-sized Swiss e-commerce player launched an MVP for a B2B order-tracking portal. Instead of developing all features, the team focused on real-time tracking and automatic alerts. After two months, feedback confirmed demand for advanced traceability, guiding subsequent developments toward predictive delivery-time analysis.

Why Choose an MVP: Key Advantages

An MVP enables rapid market validation while minimizing initial investment and refining the product roadmap. It provides a clear view of priorities to maximize business impact.It is an effective way to reduce time-to-market, optimize resources, and generate concrete customer feedback.

Rapid Market Validation

By launching a simplified version, you test value hypotheses with target users. Adoption and satisfaction metrics guide the decision to proceed or pivot.

This approach reduces uncertainty: rather than basing strategy on qualitative studies or surveys, you act on real, measurable behaviors. Decisions become more objective and grounded in tangible data.

The continuous feedback loop allows you to adjust positioning, segmentation, and marketing messages in real time, avoiding heavy investments in an unvalidated direction.

Cost Reduction and Resource Optimization

The MVP limits the functional scope to essentials, significantly reducing development, design, and infrastructure costs. Focusing on the core makes teams more agile.

Modular open-source or custom components facilitate an extensible foundation without disproportionate initial cost. Each new feature can be integrated as an independent module, controlling code complexity.

Internally, this lightens teams’ workloads, allowing them to focus on analysis and iterations rather than maintaining unnecessary features.

Time Savings and Accelerated Time-to-Market

Designing an MVP means adopting a phased deployment strategy. You deliver the core value first, then evolve based on user feedback, shortening traditional development cycles.

This method fits seamlessly into an agile process: each sprint delivers a usable, testable version. Stakeholders track progress through tangible demos, enhancing transparency and project buy-in.

The product reaches its first operational maturity faster, offering a decisive competitive advantage in capturing market share or attracting investors.

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Pitfalls to Avoid When Designing an MVP

The main pitfall is confusing an MVP with a shoddy version, which undermines product perception and reliability. An imprecise scope definition or neglected user experience can skew feedback.It is vital to anticipate brand impact and maintain quality from the first deployment.

Unclear Functional Scope

Without precise framing, the MVP can quickly drift into a product that’s too complex or, conversely, lacks distinctive value. Stakeholders lose a shared vision and development efforts scatter.

It’s crucial to formalize the unique value proposition, then list the must-have features to illustrate it. Any addition outside this scope must undergo formal validation based on field feedback.

This rigor prevents scope creep and ensures every line of code directly contributes to validating the initial strategic hypothesis.

Underestimating User Experience

An MVP is not just a skeleton: it must deliver a reliable UX. Bugs, latency, or unintuitive interfaces can discourage users and generate unrepresentative negative feedback.

To guarantee quality, prioritize proven web or mobile frameworks, a minimal design system, and automated tests for critical scenarios. Effort invested here directly impacts product credibility.

A smooth experience from the first version builds user trust and encourages engagement—the cornerstone of the feedback loop and long-term adoption.

Impact on Brand Image

If the MVP is perceived as unfinished, it can harm the company’s reputation. A perception of seriousness and reliability relies on consistent quality, even in early versions.

Communicate clearly about the learning and continuous-improvement objectives, positioning the MVP as a controlled, collaborative, and iterative phase rather than a mere test.

Internally, this means involving marketing and communications teams to set expectations, frame external messaging, and turn feedback into promotional opportunities.

Example: A Swiss insurance group launched an MVP for an online premium simulator without visual guarantees, leading to confusion and poor reception. After UX refinements and adding an interactive guide, the form completion rate doubled and feedback became positive.

An Effective Design Method for a Successful MVP

A structured approach in five key steps ensures an MVP aligned with the value proposition and user expectations. Each step relies on concrete validation through real feedback.The key lies in technical neutrality, modular open-source architecture, and agile iterations.

Identify the Value Proposition

Start by formalizing the central hypothesis: what problem are you solving, and for which user? This step requires business-alignment workshops, competitive analysis, and stakeholder interviews.

The outcome is a concise document outlining context, stakes, and measurable success criteria. This charter serves as a reference for the entire project and guides the initial backlog.

A clear definition steers technological and functional choices, prevents speculation, and enables rapid prioritization of development tasks.

Determine Essential Features

Based on the value proposition, list the must-have features needed to prove the offering’s interest. Evaluate each item by its potential impact and implementation complexity.

Select only those features that directly contribute to validating the hypothesis, classifying them as “must-haves” and postponing “nice-to-haves” to later phases.

This method ensures a controlled scope and rapid development, minimizing unnecessary costs and delays from secondary features.

Collect and Analyze User Feedback

From the first deployed version, implement measurement and feedback mechanisms: analytics, observation sessions, targeted surveys, and qualitative interviews.

The goal is to confront the initial hypothesis with real usage. Identify blockers, unmet needs, and improvement ideas prioritized by users.

This phase is crucial for adjusting the roadmap, ranking upcoming features, and building an iteration plan based on reliable data.

Rapid Iteration and Continuous Deployment

Leveraging a modular architecture, deploy each iteration via a CI/CD process. Automated tests and code reviews ensure stability with every release.

Each iteration loop should be short enough to test a new hypothesis or implement an adjustment while maintaining consistent quality.

This approach fosters continuous learning, transparent management, and swift adaptation to market changes or user feedback.

Example: A Swiss omnichannel retailer built an MVP of its click & collect app in four weeks. Thanks to a microservices architecture and a lightweight RESTful API, each new feature (inventory management, scheduling, notifications) was deployed continuously, leading to a nationwide rollout in three months with a 92% customer satisfaction rate.

Build a High-Performing, Strategic MVP

A well-defined and executed MVP becomes a genuine steering tool to rapidly validate the value proposition and guide development. The benefits—time savings, cost control, targeted feedback—materialize from the first releases, provided you maintain a clear scope, a refined user experience, and an extensible architecture.

By applying a five-step method—identification, prioritization, design, feedback, and iteration—you secure your decisions and gain the agility to tailor your offering to real expectations.

Our experts are here to support you in strategic framing, selecting the right technologies, and setting up an agile organization. Together, we will turn your MVP into a long-term success driver.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert

PUBLISHED BY

David Mendes

Avatar de David Mendes

David is a Senior UX/UI Designer. He crafts user-centered journeys and interfaces for your business software, SaaS products, mobile applications, websites, and digital ecosystems. Leveraging user research and rapid prototyping expertise, he ensures a cohesive, engaging experience across every touchpoint.

Categories
Featured-Post-UX-Design (EN) UI/UX Design EN

Guide: Recruiting a Digital/IT Project Manager and a Product Owner in Switzerland

Guide: Recruiting a Digital/IT Project Manager and a Product Owner in Switzerland

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

The digital transformation demands rigorous coordination and a clear product vision to deliver high-performing digital solutions. Identifying the right profile – a digital/IT project manager or a product owner – is a strategic challenge in Switzerland, where the pace of innovation and organizational complexity continues to grow. Companies seek to combine governance, deadline control, and business alignment within technically skilled, agile teams. This guide details each role’s responsibilities, their complementarities, the benefits of hiring them, and best practices for an adapted selection process. It also addresses the dilemma between insourcing, outsourcing, or hybrid models to effectively steer digital projects.

Clarifying Responsibilities: Digital/IT Project Manager vs. Product Owner

The digital project manager coordinates all deployment activities and ensures deadlines and budgets are met. The product owner defines the product vision, prioritizes features, and acts as the interface between business stakeholders and the technical team.

Primary Responsibilities of the Digital/IT Project Manager

The digital or IT project manager is responsible for planning and delivering digital initiatives. They establish the schedule, monitor progress, and anticipate risks related to resources or technical dependencies. By defining key performance indicators, they ensure milestones are met and deliverables maintain high quality.

They orchestrate collaboration among internal teams, external vendors, and stakeholders. Leading steering committees and running progress reviews, they keep the project cohesive. Their cross-functional posture requires a deep understanding of business needs and technical constraints.

This role demands mastery of traditional methods (waterfall, formal communications) and agile approaches (Scrum, Kanban). The IT project manager must adapt their management style according to the organization’s maturity and the nature of deliverables.

Primary Responsibilities of the Product Owner

The product owner represents the business vision of the product throughout the development cycle. They manage the backlog by aligning each user story with strategic priorities and end-user expectations. Their mission begins with writing value-focused specifications and continues with daily trade-off decisions.

They serve as the business advocate to the technical team. By refining acceptance criteria and validating deliverables, they ensure the product’s functional coherence. Their involvement is continuous, from initial scoping to successive iterations.

The product owner drives the roadmap and tracks KPIs related to adoption and user satisfaction. Their expertise in design thinking and user-centricity helps create enhancements that truly meet internal and external customer needs.

Convergences and Complementarities

Both profiles share a common objective: the success of digital projects and stakeholder satisfaction. They collaborate closely to balance constraint compliance with continuous value creation. This complementarity streamlines processes and reduces project drift.

The digital project manager focuses on governance, budgets, and coordination, while the product owner hones the value proposition and functional content. Their collaboration allows simultaneous tracking of the “what” and the “how” of deliverables.

In some organizations, a single professional may combine both roles for medium-sized projects or during transition phases. This flexibility suits resource-constrained structures, provided the individual holds dual expertise.

Example: A Geneva-based business services firm entrusted a hybrid profile with managing a digital reporting platform and prioritizing new features, enabling them to meet a tight schedule while ensuring internal user satisfaction.

Why Invest in These Profiles?

Hiring a digital project manager or a product owner secures the stewardship of digital initiatives. These profiles bring methodology, strategic alignment, and agility to maximize project value.

Operational Efficiency Gains

A digital or IT project manager improves dependency management and ensures structured execution. By promptly identifying and addressing blockers, the project advances predictably. Regular status meetings and reports bolster transparency.

Conversely, the product owner minimizes wasted development by focusing efforts on high-value features. Each iteration is measured against business and user objectives. This approach reduces rework and optimizes ROI.

Their combination breaks down silos and enhances coordination between business and IT. Teams stay focused on clear objectives, which lowers tensions and delays caused by misunderstandings or shifting priorities.

Impact on Governance and Visibility

A digital or IT project manager structures decision-making bodies and defines a governance framework. Steering committees—facilitated with relevant indicators—give leaders real-time insight into project status. Risks are identified early and managed proactively.

The product owner contributes functional transparency by regularly publishing roadmaps and backlogs. Business stakeholders can follow progress, provide feedback, and adjust priorities without disrupting development flow.

This dual visibility—operational and functional—aids budget arbitration and strategic decision-making. It strengthens sponsor buy-in and builds confidence in digital investments.

Practical Case: A Swiss Watchmaker

An SME watchmaker in the canton of Vaud hired a product owner through an external provider to oversee the redesign of its online store. Simultaneously, a digital project manager handled integrations with ERP and CRM systems. Result: production launch met deadlines and conversion rate rose by 18% in the first quarter.

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Insourcing vs. Outsourcing: How to Decide

Insourcing the role ensures deep contextual knowledge and strong organizational anchoring. Outsourcing provides rapid flexibility and access to specialized expertise without permanent commitments.

Advantages of Insourcing

By insourcing the digital project manager, IT project manager, or product owner, organizations gain swift ownership of business challenges. Familiarity with internal processes and key actors boosts responsiveness to change and clarity on priorities.

An internal employee stays for the long term and can drive the roadmap beyond a single project. They foster a continuous agile culture and share best practices across teams.

Finally, insourcing creates a stable point of contact for sponsors and end users, reducing risks related to knowledge loss during turnover.

Strengths of Outsourcing

Engaging a specialized provider for the digital project manager or product owner delivers immediate upskilling. External expertise—accustomed to diverse contexts—brings proven methods and industry benchmarks.

This model cuts integration time and financial commitment linked to long-term hiring. It allows resource scaling according to project load without complex HR processes.

Outsourcing often ensures neutrality in functional and operational decisions. The provider can recommend enhancements or correct course without internal political constraints.

Hybrid and Partial Outsourcing Models

Organizations can blend internal and external resources to balance contextual knowledge and sector expertise. For example, an internal product owner may steer strategic roadmap planning while an external digital/IT project manager handles technical coordination.

A hybrid model fosters internal skill development through knowledge transfer. Best practices introduced by the provider enrich the organization and remain accessible after the mission ends.

Example: A Romandy industrial group we supported chose to pair a permanent digital project manager with an outsourced product owner for its customer portal redesign—ensuring both business continuity and operational flexibility.

This choice between insourcing, outsourcing, and a hybrid approach should be made based on each company’s context. Our experts regularly advise clients on this decision.

Running the Recruitment Process: Practical Tips

Successful hiring relies on a clear job description, precise selection criteria, and rigorous soft-skill assessment. Implementing a structured process—combining practical exercises and targeted interviews—ensures candidate alignment with business objectives.

Crafting a Clear, Comprehensive Job Description

The job description should outline responsibilities, expected deliverables, and organizational context. It should list technical skills (project management, agile methods, tracking tools) and interpersonal qualities (leadership, communication, diplomacy).

Define performance indicators for the role: deadline adherence, deliverable quality, stakeholder satisfaction. This clarity aids interview discussions and candidate comparisons.

Finally, specify reporting structure and collaboration expectations with internal or external teams to avoid misunderstandings and clarify interactions from day one.

Sourcing and Pre-Selection Methods

Sourcing can leverage specialized professional networks, digital talent platforms, or recruitment firms. Seek referrals and tap into open-source communities or meetups to find engaged candidates.

During pre-selection, a quick initial contact validates motivation, relevant experience, and cultural fit. A structured questionnaire focused on past use cases sheds light on methodologies and environments encountered.

Short technical tests or case studies can complement early discussions to assess diagnostic skills and practical action planning.

Candidate Selection and Evaluation

Interviews should include at least one practical scenario where the candidate presents an approach to scoping a project or prioritizing a backlog. This simulation reveals rigor, synthesizing skills, and stakeholder-persuasion ability.

Soft-skill assessment should cover communication, conflict management, and collaboration mindset. Behavioral questions (“describe a stakeholder conflict and how you handled it”) gauge managerial posture.

Finally, a joint interview with future colleagues or sponsors ensures mutual understanding of expectations and builds trust before the final decision.

Optimize Your Digital Governance with the Right Profiles

Clearly defining the roles and missions of the digital/IT project manager and the product owner ensures coherent governance and efficient execution of digital projects. Their complementarity enhances agility, transparency, and alignment between business strategy and technical delivery. Choosing between insourcing, outsourcing, or a hybrid model depends on priorities of contextual knowledge, flexibility, and skills transfer.

A structured recruitment process, supported by precise criteria and relevant practical exercises, maximizes the chance of finding the right candidate to drive your digital transformation. At Edana, our experts are at your disposal to discuss your challenges and offer tailored support, whether integrating these profiles internally or leveraging partial or complete outsourcing.

Talk to an Edana expert about your challenges