CONNECT Framework

Framing is an up-front engagement to assess the fit between your organization's product needs and DSA's service offering.

Framing is an opportunity for you to get to acquainted with DSA and for us to ask questions, conduct preliminary research, and collaboratively ideate on what a productive partnership might look like.

During this time, DSA invests its resources into understanding your business, industry, and people, with the goal of forming a long and mutually-productive partnership.

By the end of this engagement, DSA gains an informed picture of your organization's needs; in other words, Framing serves as a foundation to any solution design project – a period of upfront collaboration that enables us to build a DSA team that is hand-picked to best serve your goals, priorities, and immediate objectives.

Solution Design is a fixed price, fixed-length exercise that lasts between four and ten weeks.

During this time, the DSA team conducts a series of interviews to gain a holistic understanding of the product requirements, which we then organize into an evolving, prioritized backlog known as the “Problem Space.” Our team employs AI-assisted analysis where beneficial to identify patterns and opportunities that might not be immediately apparent through traditional research methods.

The cadence of Solution Design is structured around a series of bi-weekly gate reviews, which provide an structured forum for stakeholders to align on the product vision, raise open questions, and discuss next steps.

Ultimately, the Solution Design is designed to achieve two key objectives:

• Align all stakeholders on high-level “North Star” vision (business strategy, architecture, UI/UX)
• Lay the contours of a delivery plan to reach the minimum viable product (MVP) of your North Star vision

A successful Solution Design phase will unlock an Elaboration phase.

Elaboration is the connecting chapter between Solution Design and Product Development.

The Elaboration phase derives its starting point from the foundation laid during solution design, which it then uses to structure the team’s approach across five main workstreams:

• Process establishment
• Business requirements
• Technical requirements
• UX / UI Design work
• Team Ramp up

At this stage, efforts in the business, technical, and UX/UI workstreams are spread across both the problem space and its complement–an organized space for ideation and prototyping which we call the “Solution Space.”

Over the course of elaboration, the solution space gets refined into a product backlog that we iteratively deliver against during product development.

Product Development is the final, and ongoing phase of our four chapters.

During this phase, we will continually refine the process and roadmap which are delivered as part of Elaboration, utilizing AI-powered development tools and testing automation where they can accelerate delivery without compromising quality.

We think of Product Development as an iterative "rinse-and-repeat" exercise, where incremental process improvements, roadmap modifications, and team changes are made as the journey unfolds and new information and priorities are uncovered.

Initial sprints will have already begun towards the end of Elaboration, but it’s during Product Development that the delivery team finds its full stride. Velocity is increased as processes and estimations are refined.

The Product Development phase has the following high-level goals:

• Stand up a development team and establish a reliable process for estimating delivery
• Produce a well-defined roadmap, with a Solution Design workstream working proactively ahead of delivery
• Establish processes to continuously assess, model, and apply changes to our product roadmap and delivery plan as needed, and proactively tackle challenges as they arise
• Establish strong working relationships across both organizations, with well understood responsibilities, clear governance and reporting, and healthy collaboration
• Ensure daily that the product being built aligns with the client's vision defined in Elaboration and refined on an ongoing basis