About Differential
5 Tips and Tools that Make Remote Work Actually Work
We have 25 employees spread across the country. Half of our company is based out of Cincinnati (our company headquarters), with the other half spanning from Florida to Oregon, Las Vegas to New York, and multiple states in between (Brett asks that we don’t mention Oklahoma). We care deeply about...
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Products
How We Gather Product Insights Faster By Automating These 5 Questions
Objective As Product Designers we know that user interviews or feedback can yield the most valuable insights. Yet, Product Owners often have little appetite for User or Customer Research. To keep up with the fast-moving pace of digital products, we needed to answer: “How might we continuously...
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Design
Enough is Enough - Why 5 User Interviews?
After running design sprints for companies of all shapes and sizes in a wide range of industries over the last eighteen months or so, we’ve become familiar with some of the most common questions our clients have about design sprints and Differential’s process in general. One of those questions is,...
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Development
How to Setup GraphQL Subscriptions on a Serverless Infrastructure
Background A serverless end-to-end architecture can be a great choice when a digital product needs burst scalability, self-healing, and extremely low costs. The biggest downside to going serverless is the lack of in-memory storage which forces every interaction in the API to be completely stateless.‍ Apollo Server's shortcomings Apollo Server...
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Products
What’s the Point of the User Interviews?
When building a digital product, you have to make some assumptions about the people who will ultimately use that product. If you don’t work to validate or invalidate your assumptions as you go, you will (almost always) fail. At Differential, we get feedback from real users early in the process...
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Business
10 Questions to Ask Before You Build Your MVP
Creating great digital products is a journey. At each development stage, there are assumptions that have been made and can make or break your digital product project. Identifying and testing your assumptions early on can dramatically reduce the risk and costs - including the opportunity cost of time lost if...
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Products
Should I Use and Why Should I Use It?
There are over one million packages indexed on NPM, the most popular package registry for JavaScript packages. While it's an indispensable resource for developers building applications — offering efficiency, convenience, and reliability — it's important to evaluate the impact of using any package in your project. That's where Should I...
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Development
3 Ways to Improve Your Product
There are three ways to improve a digital product or feature; you can make it better so that current customers enjoy it more (Deliberate Improvement), change it so that people use it more often (Frequency Improvement), or change it so that more people use it (Adoption Improvement). As Des Traynor,...
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Business
Company Software: When Does It Make More Sense to Build Than to Buy?
One of the most challenging responsibilities for any CEO is balancing resources between a company’s immediate needs and its long-term growth. This daunting task is perhaps seen most clearly in the build vs buy dilemma: should an organization invest resources in developing custom software, or simply purchase an off-the-shelf solution?...
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Business
Communicating Vision & Progress
As an entrepreneur or product owner in a larger company, you’re responsible not only for setting the vision for your team and holding them accountable to goals and deadlines throughout the project, but also for keeping your project funded through clear communicating with stakeholders and executive sponsors. Not exactly easy...
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