Digital Product Assessment

Welcome to Blue Sprout, your go-to destination for growing tech ideas and cultivating solutions for your organization. If you are considering the acquisition of a digital product company, assessing your own team, or trying to determine the future direction for your digital product then a comprehensive assessment is a great place to start.

Aligned Methodology

We break down a company into a holistic set of categories that look at everything from their strategy and vision to their current state to their capabilities and people.

Our assessment is designed to help you get clarity about

1. Where you want to go (vision and strategy)?
2. Where you are today (current state/performance)?
3. What will it take to get where you want to go (current capabilities and maturity)?

We help you and your team understand where you have gaps or actual blind spots. Our assessment will help you understand what it will take to get you where you want to go, but will do so from a developmental perspective. In other words, we use the concept of maturity to help you understand where you are and what are your developmentally appropriate next steps.

We recommend the highest ROI actions for the short and medium term and because we are experts at building products, we can help you understand where to focus to ensure your success.

Strategy

Understanding company goals and how a product is positioned to achieve those goals is critical to performing a quality assessment. We answer important questions like:

• Where is the product headed and why?
• What is the future of this product and where does the company want to go with it?

We dive deep into the product's vision, roadmap, market, target customers and users, and even the brand strategy to ensure not only that the product is properly aligned, but that it is well supported by these other essential functions.

Performance 

Performance is where we dive into how things are currently working today. We answer questions like:

• How is the product performing today?
• How do customers/users find the product and how do they engage in sales?
• How effective is the organization at converting opportunities?
• What does customer retention look like?

Similar to strategy, it is important to understand how functions like customer acquisition, retention, referrals, user/customer mix, operating cost are affecting the performance of the product. You could have an incredible product, but a terrible customer acquisition model and that may mislead you into thinking you are missing the mark with your product.

Capabilities 

Capabilities is all about the people, processes, and technology surrounding your product. We answer questions like:

• How well does the organization execute the strategy?
• What does the team look like and how well do they work together?
• What are their processes for building products?
• What does their technology look like and is it appropriate for the stage they are in?

The capabilities section is performed after knowing the strategy and performance. Unlike most assessments, we believe it is critical to understand where a product is at in its lifecycle before diving into the technology and the team that is tasked with building it. This gives us a foundational baseline of developmental appropriateness to use for the assessment.

Is the Product Developmentally Appropriate?

Digital product companies transition through common developmental stages and it is critical to assess a company based on where it is currently at in this cycle.

Why is this critical?  Comparing a company that is still trying to get its first customer (0-1 Stage) to a mature company would result in unfair and inaccurate conclusions about the product/company and would also obfuscate what is actually great about the company.

Praising an early stage company for achieving mature company standards can also hide the fact that the company has prematurely invested in areas that are still unknown to it.  This would be a bad thing disguised as something good!

More than a Findings Report

Throughout the assessment we aim to gather as much information as we can through conversations, artifacts, observations, etc.

We track our answers, determine if it is developmentally appropriate, and attempt to classify any risks associated with the result.

OUT OF SCOPE

We do not answer if your product is going to succeed in the market. We are not experts in your market, you are, so you bring the market insights that we trust.