The Backstory

A few years ago, entrepreneur Pat Kinsel was trying to finalize the sale of his company to Twitter. The only problem? A recent ski accident left him with a shattered knee and a pile of paperwork that needed to be notarized. Since notaries don’t make house calls, Pat was stuck. There had to be a better way.

Six custom-built user applications and 5,000 batched updates to the code later, our engineering team made it happen. Pat came to MetaLab looking for a partner to help him design and develop a fully virtual notarization platform from scratch, and now thousands of people use Notarize every day to get their legal documents out the door in minutes. 

We had a feeling this would be one of our most challenging and rewarding projects to date, and we weren’t disappointed. It was exciting to lead the charge on breathing new life into a brick and mortar business with technology and design. Here’s what we discovered about our development process along the way. 

Lesson 1: Don’t let the learning curve be a showstopper

The complexities of the notarization industry are not for the faint of heart. To get ourselves up to speed, we jumped into research and started talking to Pat and notaries right away. We also worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the Notarize team to write the end-to-end business logic of getting a document notarized. Sharing regular application builds with industry experts helped ensure we were running after the right goals, actioning the right feedback, and accounting for the full user experience in our development roadmap. 

Lesson 2: The integrity of the user experience is non-negotiable

With legal hoops to jump through, personal data to protect, and logistical realities to contend with, it was tricky to prioritize ease of use. But if we couldn’t build a seamless user experience that met strict legal requirements, we had no product. With the right technical expertise and a lot of creativity, we found solutions for every blocker that posed a threat to the quality of the user experience.

Having an API service with many different front end applications meant it was important to maintain data integrity and speed up request times. We used a graphQL server to keep requests brief and allow each front end to request and receive only what was needed at the time. Customers could join a queue, see realistic wait times, and get paired with the right notary for their needs as soon as they become available. 

If we couldn’t build a seamless user experience that met strict legal requirements, we had no product.

Nobody likes wasting time, so creating a positive waiting room experience was central to the product’s success. 

Lesson 3: Change is constant, so code accordingly

Since this product was charting completely new territory, we had to accommodate new and constantly-shifting requirements and business logic. We worked hard to architect the product and its codebase so that we could make sweeping changes with ease and speed.

For example, when we realized that most notary customers need multiple documents signed by multiple signers, we had to touch about 80% of the code to make this multi-signer update. Because we spent time upfront getting to know exactly how each feature interacted on the app architecture level, making this change was relatively simple, and didn’t interfere with getting a stable MVP out into the wild.

Lesson 4: Newer isn’t always better

In the development world, there’s a tendency to assume the next shiny new tech will solve problems better and faster than its predecessors. On this project, we learned how to let each tech play to its strengths, harmonizing old with new instead of choosing one over the other. 

The main languages we used were tried and tested, like Ruby on Rails, which is known to be reliable and generate a quick and solid back end server.  But when we needed something that could handle the strain of our queueing, we turned to more cutting edge tech for the back end, like Elixir and Phoenix, and React Redux on the front end. 

Lesson 5: New challenges mean new milestones

Who said tough projects aren’t fun? Some of my best work memories to date happened on this project when we’d invite the entire engineering team to try and break the code we’d written. These “testing parties” were a blast and the bugs we uncovered ultimately helped us develop our most stable code ever. Not to mention it was a pretty awesome milestone to code for the first digital mortgage signed in the US!        

Lesson 6: The ROI of trust is infinite

This project required a massive—and collective—leap of faith on both sides to push technology into completely new space. We knew it would be key to establish mutual trust early on and that investment paid off. Just last year, Notarize secured an additional $20 million in funding, has facilitated more than $1 billion in real estate transactions, and currently supports over 5,000 businesses across all industries. With 1.2 billion notarized transactions taking place every year, we’re proud to have built the product at the forefront of this $32 billion market opportunity.

Want to learn more about how our design and development teams worked together to make Notarize happen? Check out the case study here.

Now that you have a strategy and your differentiators in place, it’s time to draft the entire product experience into a single document. This is a key step in the product lifecycle called product definition. 

One of the key deliverables that comes out of the product definition is the product blueprint. Your product blueprint allows you to visualize the entire product service on one page. This helps manage its complexity, including the actions and touchpoints of all the actors, key features, technical dependencies, and operational requirements.

Behind the scenes, there are several key assets that power this product blueprint: 

This view helps to ensure your team is aligned on the critical pieces of success.

That being said, it’s easy to go overboard with product blueprints, so don’t boil the ocean! Focus on the few critical features and components that will make a big impact for your customers.

Remember to trust in yourself and the research that has been done. Your customers don't always know what the right solution is for their wants and needs. That's why it's your job to consider their needs in the context of your product's potential and develop an appropriate blueprint that can scale in the future.

We saw earlier that you’re going to be spending the majority of your time in the product definition/design, testing, and build phases, which means you need a talented team of skilled makers. 

This may seem obvious, but when building the right team with the right chemistry within your budget, there are a lot of factors to consider. How long will it take for the team to gel? Do you stick with who you have? When should you contract vs. hire?

Too often, we see companies spend big budgets hiring a ton of great developers and designers. They throw them onto a project expecting the product will be delivered fast only to find the team isn’t hitting their milestones. Why? 

Teams typically struggle to get going immediately because of differing working styles, personalities, mindsets, and honestly… sometimes ego. That’s why you shouldn’t focus on individual hires but on the team as a whole.

If you have time, budget, and desire to invest in the future culture of your company, you have to invest time to build the team dynamics. We find that it typically takes 4-5 sprints for a team to find its groove — approximately four months, or more.

If you are an early stage startup, and don’t have a lot of time (six months or less), but still want to get a product out there quickly, we recommend hiring a pre-built team of skilled makers who have launched several products together. 

The key takeaway is to not waste all of your time and money hiring. Building a successful team takes time and cycles of members working together to hit their stride. When necessary, augment with experts to help your team grow, add a skill, or just simply to outsource a function. It ultimately comes down to how you want to allocate your resources.

Don’t reinvent the wheel… and don’t build everything from scratch! Accelerators are existing tools and technologies you can leverage or integrate into your product.

Some of the tools that we use to help accelerate the design process to create and test out designs, concepts, and prototypes with users include Figma, Framer.io, and even Typeform.

For development, we use many different tools and platforms on our projects to help accelerate the product development lifecycle and build products that can scale to meet customer demand.  Several of the most popular and impactful integrations and platforms used by our teams include:

AI is everywhere these days for a reason. It’s powering brand new ways to get work done and being incorporated into almost every tool we already use to make workflows easier. From content creation to scheduling, we are seeing tools popping up for everything. Here are a few that can help accelerate product development:

There are important considerations to keep in mind when using any AI tool in a responsible way. Sensitivity of data uploaded into any of these systems and the originality of the content is a big one.

Policies and regulation with AI are still being figured out, so it’s wise to exercise caution when setting guidelines for your product teams. Leverage these tools as inspiration or starting points for copy, as pieces of a larger composite for images, or to get as specific as possible with prompts in order to generate something unique.

Product development succeeds when teams develop a culture of continuous learning. This is fueled by rigorous testing, analytics, and strategic iteration during key phases of the product lifecycle.

In the discovery phase, we immerse ourselves in understanding our potential early adopters' needs and motivations (see #validators). Alongside this, we work with clients to think through solid analytics strategies. This step instills a data-centric culture from the start, setting the stage for ongoing learning and adaptation. 

By aligning qualitative user insights with a framework for quantitative data capture, we ensure the product strategy we craft will continually evolve to meet user needs.

As we pivot to the alpha and beta stages, the emphasis turns to iterative improvement. We engage early adopters in testing programs. Their first-hand experiences provides invaluable feedback to detect bugs and potential enhancements. 

This feedback, bolstered by real-time analytics data, drives our evidence-based refinement process, prepping the product to be market-fit.

By investing in this cycle of continuous learning — persistent testing, data-informed analytics, and strategic iteration — we embrace a user-centric ethos in product development. This equips our clients to not just navigate, but also thrive.

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When Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder/Product Director at Facebook) was working on the first iteration of his personalized coaching product, he validated it quickly with a paid offering he pieced together with a number of low-code tools.

Leveraging learnings from a community of early adopters, he partnered with MetaLab to help enhance, refine, and evolve the product into the Outpace app.

Outpace launched earlier this year. It provides guided programs for personalized career development designed to level up with the support of a one-on-one AI coach.

We are in a post-WeWork/Theranos era of founders promising growth without showing any profit. You need to ask yourself "What do we need to show investors?" Users are great, but how is this actually going to make money?

You have to show real numbers and an actionable monetization strategy. This means outlining your marketing and growth strategies — and the mechanisms that will bring in not only revenue but profit.

Revenue strategies can vary greatly, but the following are a few of the most common buckets of digital product monetization mechanisms:

There are many ways to monetize a product, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. The right way is the one that will resonate with your audience, so feel free to experiment and be flexible when choosing a strategy.

We’ve been supporting Modular with the release of their new AI platform and product offerings. Early in our engagement, they asked us to design a marketing site to help them grow and segment their sales pipeline. This allowed them better understand, and target, existing and potential users. We took those early learnings to ensure the product landed with their audience and supported their revenue targets.

The product lifecycle doesn’t end with a launch, it goes far beyond. Once you begin to get a better understanding of your customers and their purchase behaviours, it’s vital to adapt, being flexible with pricing, monetization strategies, and identifying unexpected revenue drivers. 

For example, you may see that your primary offering for your SaaS tool is slowly gaining traction, but over and over customers are requesting access to an API for a specific data flow. You may be sitting on a large additional untapped revenue stream and there could be more. Meet your customers where they are!

It helps to consult the people who’ve been there before. There are a million people on LinkedIn who are trying to sell you a service or product that you may not need. There are critical steps that could cost you if you miss them. There are shortcuts you may not even know exist. Trusted advisors can help you navigate this and more. There is just no substitute for experience.

Find seasoned product leaders, designers, or engineers who have launched products in the past and will be familiar with the nitty-gritty details. They will have the perspective to help you find the forest through the trees. You want people on your side who can make sure you are spending your time, efforts, and money on the right things.

These are the Product Survival Kit items that we recommend to anyone who is creating and launching a product in today's climate. It's a mix of techniques, processes, people, actions and tools that we've seen provide success to many of our clients, colleagues and partners out there. But remember — each product is different, so find the mix that worst best for you. 

It may seem daunting but it is possible to successfully bring your idea or product concept to life today.  This may even be the right moment to go after it. Companies who launch useful and impactful products during economic downturns have a history of surviving and thriving. The next one could be you.