Insights tagged "Featured"

Blog categories

All AI Architecture Cloud Corporate innovation Cybersecurity Energytech Featured Fintech Healthtech Idea to MVP Press Releases Private equity Product design Publishing Quality Assurance SaaS Startup Team Team As A Service Technology Telecom Testing Trending UX/UI Design

Raluca Lupasteanu - 5 Nov 2026

What you get at the end of a product design phase

In the way we run it, a product design phase ends with nine deliverables: a user story map, an estimated feature breakdown, a release plan, a prototype of the primary journeys, design system foundations, technical architecture documentation, a recommended team capacity, a cost and timeline projection and a summary for budget holders. Other companies structure the phase differently, so the list is a reference point rather than a standard. Each deliverable has a test a buyer can run before the final presentation, and the prototype, which gets the most attention in that meeting, says the least about whether development can start.

Featured
Alex Marciuc - 23 Oct 2026

Building internal tools with AI: what it took to reach production

Our internal tools, built with AI coding tools, reached first real use in days or weeks. Replacing the spreadsheets behind them took longer by design: a parallel run with an exit rule of three weeks with no differences, and reconciliation that showed the old tools were often the ones that were wrong. Inside the tools, AI reads unstructured input while hours and money stay in deterministic code.

Technology Featured AI
Alex Marciuc - 18 Oct 2026

How to reduce risk before committing to a full product build

Reducing risk before a full product build starts with knowing where each risk gets settled: a product design phase settles scope, technical feasibility and the estimate range, while a clickable prototype in front of users settles usability. Willingness to pay, retention and production behaviour are only settled by a first release or by running code, so risks carried into the build need an owner, a signal and a decision date.

Idea to MVP Featured Startup Product design
Stefan Sarbu - 13 Oct 2026

MVP in-house vs. development partner: where knowledge should live

Whether an MVP is built in-house, with a development partner or as a hybrid is easiest to decide by asking where the product's knowledge needs to live. Product and domain knowledge belongs inside the company from the first day, technical architecture knowledge needs an in-house owner by launch and delivery capacity can be rented for longest. Planning the move from partner to in-house team before the build starts keeps either model reversible.

Idea to MVP Featured Startup
Mihai Bâlea - 7 Oct 2026

What a clickable prototype should prove before the build

A clickable prototype no longer proves much by looking finished, since AI tools can now produce a convincing one in an afternoon. Before it is used to approve a build budget, it should pass four tests: it holds up beyond the happy path, the people who will use it have reacted to it, every screen maps to the feature breakdown and the assumptions behind it are written down. What it cannot show is demand, behaviour under real conditions or build effort.

Featured Product design
Ionut Lomer - 23 Sep 2026

What a product design phase needs from you before it starts

A product design phase is a four to six week engagement in which a product manager, a UX designer and a software development lead turn a product idea into a scope that can be estimated and built. Those three roles run the work, but several decisions that shape the outcome belong to the client and are made before it starts: who holds decision authority, how much time domain and technical experts can give, how much of the technical role survives price negotiation and what "complete" is taken to mean. This article sets out what each role does, what each needs from the client and how to check readiness before signing.

Featured Product design
Tudor Iordache - 16 Sep 2026

AI coding agents: measuring ROI before you scale them

Gartner's 2026 market guide for enterprise AI coding agents reports that 90% of engineering leaders see improvements from the tools, against a net average productivity gain of 19.3%. A separate Gartner analysis of technology adoption puts the share of software engineering leaders reporting significant ROI from AI across the development lifecycle at 35%. The distance between those figures is not a tooling failure. It is what happens when a team adopts agents without a pre-adoption baseline, budgets for them as seats while vendors move to usage-based pricing and expects acceleration in the parts of delivery that agents do not touch.

Featured AI
Mihai Bâlea - 28 Aug 2026

AI-assisted product design: what your design system must enforce

AI has entered product design at both ends of the process and barely touched the middle. Discovery now runs through AI research synthesis and synthetic participants, generation runs through prompt-to-prototype tools, and the design phase between them is the only part of the sequence that produces output that somebody can be held to. That distinction matters because generated design output becomes usable only where a system enforces constraints rather than documenting them, and enforcement is the part that most teams have not built. This article uses a three-zone model, discovery, design, and generation, to locate where AI-assisted product design breaks down inside a funded team.

UX/UI Design Featured AI Product design
Alex Marciuc - 21 Aug 2026

Product design in software development is not UI/UX design

Product design and UI/UX design are not the same service. UI/UX design is the craft of the interface: information architecture, user flows, visual direction, design system foundations. Product design in software development is the phase that runs before a build and decides what gets built, whether it is technically feasible and what it will cost. It is delivered by a trio of product manager, UX designer and software development lead, and it ends in a validated, estimated, buildable scope rather than a set of screens.

UX/UI Design Featured Product design
Paula Cristea - 7 Aug 2026

7 steps to validate a product idea before you build

Product validation is the work of gathering evidence that a specific problem is worth solving for a specific audience, before any production code is written. A practical sequence runs through seven steps: define the segment, write the problem hypothesis, run discovery interviews, map existing substitutes, spike the riskiest technical assumption, prototype, then score the evidence. The output is not a feeling about the idea. It is a written argument that can survive a co-founder or an investor asking why.

Idea to MVP Featured Startup