Running a business is difficult, and as someone who has run more than 10 companies over 3 decades, I can tell you that it is not for the faint of heart. It is not easy, it is stressful, frightening, joyous, nerve-racking, and exciting all at the same time. It can have lots of really dark times and very exciting times.
So why do it? Well, the satisfaction of creating a business that helps people solve their own business challenges, and a business that allows our people to earn a good living while helping to solve those challenges is one of the main reasons.
One of the other reasons is to grow and learn as a businessperson, because challenges create a new focus and with it the realization that these challenges create new opportunities to improve things or take a new path.
This holds true to all facets of business, including digital product development. We have several examples of business owners realizing the challenges in architecting, planning, developing, testing and releasing a digital product at all stages of this process.
The digital development process is not one that is separate from the business side of a business, but instead is directly connected to it. That is why for our product development services we include a focus on understanding the business challenges that a company is dealing with, in addition to the product development challenges.
An example of this, is a recent client who wanted a website rebuild, but once we started having a deeper business conversation, it became clear that they had a lot of work flow issues and other business challenges, that we were able to solve by architecting the website and back-end to automate and streamline these processes. This solved several business challenges, as well as the initial challenge of rebuilding their website.
In the moment, challenges can and seem overwhelming, but most of the time looking back on them you see the lessons learned and the opportunities that they present.