Aim for indispensable

My espresso machine has become a more significant pillar of my life than I’d care to admit. It’s the cornerstone of my morning routine, my reliable rescue for sleepy afternoons, and my favorite ritual to perform for guests around our kitchen table.

Would I survive without my espresso machine? Arguably yes. Am I interested in such experiments? Absolutely not. To me, it’s become indispensable.

Which is the exact rare distinction any digital product should aim for. Whether it’s a telehealth app to make checking symptoms easy and fast, or a digital key to your apartment door, the goal should be to deliver people something that becomes so ingrained in their routines that they can’t imagine life without it. The kind of consistent, hyper relevant reliability whose absence is felt, and whose value becomes hard to replace.

In any project, it’s good to debate how success should be measured. But we should always aim for something that’s hard to replace.

When a product becomes indispensable to customers, it becomes indispensable to the business that built it.

Staples for customers = growth engines for you. No matter the industry or how narrow the target user, I believe it to be the North Star that’s always worth following. For us at Foxbox, it’s is far more than a tagline, but rather a built-in way to ensure we:

Understand your customers on a human level

Delivering a product customers feel like they “can’t live without,” is only possible if we first understand how they live. Not just how they perform a single isolated task, or their preferred menu screen, but who they are, what they care about, and what type of experience they’re longing for, even if they can’t articulate it yet.

Finding the answers to those questions is vital to the strategic foundation of any digital product. It makes strategists, designers and developers hyper aware of points of friction in a user’s journey, the kind that are easy to overlook or accept as “the nature of the beast.”

Good UX researchers, designers and product leaders just know how to keep digging. Because the good stuff rarely lies at the surface.

Test every assumption

Since our founding, our development philosophy hasn’t changed but only gotten sharper: Iterate constantly, build cross functionally, and treat things like CI/CD, automated testing, Agile, and user validation as non-negotiable pieces of every puzzle we solve for our clients.

It’s how we ensure we’re not only testing early assumptions about users, but also every key development decision that will actually bring the product to life. Why? Because harmony between user expectations, technical performance, and measurable business value isn’t always struck on the first chord.

Build for the long haul

Shortsighted, rushed products find their way to the recycling bin just as quickly as they’re built. Building a product that delivers sustainable long-term value means nobody loses sight of the bigger picture.

It means building platforms, products and systems that are designed for both immediate performance and long-term scalability and flexibility.

It means leveraging things like continuous delivery, scrum and automation to deliver with ease and working meticulously to address  intricate security and privacy requirements unique to our clients’ business. It’s also why proper product maintenance is critical to delivering on promises to customers, proactively identifying issues and ensuring processes are in place to resolve issues and respond to user requests.

As the pages of barely used apps on my phone can attest, all it takes is a brief dip in functionality for a digital product to be put on the proverbial shelf. Like any relationship, trust between users and a product is earned over weeks, months and even years. But it can be lost in mere moments. So plan accordingly.

Turn products into growth engines

If you can deliver your customers an experience that lives up to that standard of “indispensable”, the product itself takes on the same role within your business.

It becomes much more than just a product. It becomes the beating heart of your organization, the stalwart foundations that sustains new opportunities, revenue sources, insights, and invaluable industry advantage.

Indispensable is not easy to reach. But it should always be the direction that tells us where to go next.

If you agree, and want to define what indispensable looks like for your customers and your business, we’d love to talk.