Based on years of experience in multiple industries and deep understanding of business needs.

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Finding a reliable software development vendor is a complex task that requires selecting a firm from thousands of others. In this article, we have collected top software development companies with a high level of technical expertise, efficient processes, and consistently high results for clients. Let's also consider the main criteria you must rely on when choosing your next provider. 

Essential Criteria for Choosing Business Provider

The outsourcing model strategy is one of the most relevant for many project leads, considering factors such as budget time and quality of software solution development. This will solve the issue of finding internal resources, including project management, especially when the company owns several businesses.

However, choosing a reliable provider is not easy, so you should focus on the key criteria, which we will explore in this section. As a result, among hundreds of software development firms, you can choose a partner with a successful background and extensive experience. 

This factor for businesses can ensure that the technical team is able to create custom software development, mobile apps, or other software solutions. Thus, a software development partner with a high level of technology expertise can significantly reduce the risks of technical problems in the collaboration. 

Experience with the required technologies or programming languages such as React, Node.js, Python, etc.

A portfolio with similar technical requirements

Use approaches and methodologies, CI/CD, DevOps, automated testing, etc.

An important factor in choosing software developers for the development process is the depth and professionalism of industry specifics. The value of this for your business is determined by the software development firm's ability to apply effective solutions in your niche, whether it is fintech, healthcare, or any other. 

Previous projects in the relevant industry 

Organizational stability, a key factor in the size of a software development company specializing in software development, can be its ability to provide the right level of support for projects and the development process. 

Distribution of employees by specialization

Experience working with companies of different levels, such as startups or corporations

Diversity of support, testing, and DevOps departments. 

Feedback from previous partners and clients helps digital solution buyers assess the level of services provided and analyze the expertise of software development companies. As a result, we can get a thorough vision of a software development firm's strengths and weaknesses.

Analysis of reviews from Clutch, GoodFirms, Upwork, etc. 

Collection of recommendations from previous clients

Long-term partnerships with large companies. 

Transparent and effective communication should be a hallmark of top software development companies and not only. After all, it can significantly reduce the risks of misunderstandings, speed up decision-making in the development process, and increase the efficiency of team interaction.

Clear communication and management channels like Slack, Jira, etc. are available.

Frequency and completeness of reporting on the status of software solutions.

The team's knowledge of foreign languages for the project's needs.

Even if a software development company has up to 5 years of experience developing software solutions, this does not mean you need to wait for the brand to create itself. You should work on it from the very beginning of your business in need of a custom solution. 

A strong company brand should be a sign of its stability, recognition, and trust, ensuring that custom software development will eventually meet expectations. 

Activity in social networks and publications in the media. 

Flexibility is the speed of adaptation to new challenges and tasks, such as changes in requirements and project scaling, without losing quality.

Using Agile, Scrum, or Kanban project methodologies.

Willingness to change the team composition depending on the project's needs. 

Readiness to integrate with the client's internal teams. 

The cooperation model should be acceptable to both the businesses in need of a custom solution and the software development company. After all, the most important thing for software solutions is, above all, the result. 

However, there are specific generally accepted models:

Fixed Price - for clearly defined projects

Time & Material (T&M) - for flexible or variable projects

Dedicated team - for long-term mobile apps or web development. 

Hybrid Models - a combination of models. 

Choosing the top software development companies is not easy, and it is a certain complexity not only for the client but also for the software development companies. Much depends not only on the approaches to custom software development but also on the communication between both parties to jointly develop advanced software solutions. 

For the customer, the logical step after the outlined criteria is to directly select a top software development company that will use the necessary advanced software solutions to meet business goals. 

Therefore, the next section is devoted to an overview of top software development companies that demonstrate high professionalism and are reliable service providers that have proven their professionalism in quality assurance for many mobile apps and beyond. 

In this critical issue, you should focus on the above criteria and analyze each company you may be interested in. 

Moreover, hiring IT specialists and expanding your team is a big step toward increasing your business's value. In particular, Staff Augmentation has recently attracted attention as a model that can optimally organize workflows. 

So, what are these top software development companies, and what is their value?

<a href="https://artkai.io/services/application-modernization-services">Artkai </a>is an innovative software development company specializing in modernizing digital products, creating new solutions, and providing highly skilled engineering resources.

Combining deep UX expertise, technological excellence, and a customer-centric approach, Artkai helps businesses transform legacy systems, increase productivity, and scale digital solutions to meet modern requirements.

The company aims to develop customer-centric mobile apps and software solutions that deliver high business value.

New product development - creating digital solutions from scratch based on a user-centered approach.

Modernization of mobile applications and existing systems, improved UX, reduced technical debt, and scalability. 

Providing engineering resources - scaling up client teams for development and reducing the cost of technology ownership.

Software development company specializing in: 

Enterprise & B2B SaaS - Including a complete cycle of ERP, CRM, HRM, IoT platforms, and marketplace development. 

Fintech & Banking - Platforms for investing, trading, money transfer, and banking products. 

Web3 & Blockchain - Blockchain projects in DeFi, NFT, dApps, crypto exchanges, and betting. 

AI integration and development - Implementation of AI to improve the efficiency of business processes. Consulting, PoC, and development of AI solutions based on ML, NLP, and computer vision.

EPAM is an American company with European roots founded by Arkady Dobkin and Leo Lozner. Its mission is to create innovative solutions that deliver real business results. With numerous hubs, the company strives to be a leader in digital transformation by providing services that help businesses grow and improve people's lives.

Software engineering, with the development of high-quality software solutions tailored to customer needs.

Digital platform engineering involves creating scalable and reliable digital platforms for many industries.

Digital product design. Which takes into account UI/UX development. 

Engineering DNA with a combination of advanced technologies and engineering culture.

Development of strategic platforms, such as creating corporate, educational, financial, and healthcare ecosystems.

Fintech and banking (investment, trading, payment processing).

Healthcare and biotechnology (development of medical platforms, EMR).

E-commerce (development of marketplaces, OMS, loyalty programs)

Media and entertainment (streaming platforms, digital content, gaming solutions, and AR/VR).

Automotive industry (IoT solutions, software development for autonomous vehicles)

Ciklum is an international company headquartered in London. The company provides custom software development, mobile apps, and digital transformation services in many areas. 

The company aims to develop innovative technologies that redefine the future and contribute to exceptional customized solutions. 

The main approaches are based on creating and using strategies and integrated consulting and design capabilities. And Ciklum's distributed hybrid teams help realize the future for clients and communities worldwide by delivering quality enterprise, education, and healthcare platforms. 

Cloud platforms (optimization of cloud infrastructure with DevOps teams). 

An international IT company focused on providing a full range of software development, design, quality assurance, and consulting services. The company serves many clients worldwide, including large corporations, small and medium-sized businesses, and technology startups.

The company's value is promoting the development of each specialist by implementing software development methodologies, web development, and mobile development. 

Mobile app development services and custom software development.

Security-First Approach - compliance with cybersecurity and data protection standards.

A company that is one of the fastest growing in the United States and holds a leading position among the leading software development firms. The main idea of the teams is to turn an idea into a product using well-chosen design, engineering, AI, and data solutions for complex business problems. 

It is also essential for the company to follow approaches that will produce concrete results: 

A variety of development methodologies (Agile, Scrum, Kanban)

Communication and transparency of processes. 

FinTech (solutions for banks, payment systems, and investment platforms)

Logistics (supply chain management systems)

Entertainment and media (streaming platforms, news portals). 

Merixstudio is a technology consulting company that integrates strategy, design, and software development and helps businesses derive new value from digital technologies and mobile apps. The IT company has over 25 years of experience in the global market. They also offer customized digital solutions that will meet your goals. 

Technology consulting (digitalization of business processes and software security)

Custom development (enterprise software, web development, mobile development, cloud solutions, and DevOps).

Renewable energy (developing digital solutions for companies operating in the energy sector).

The company's software developers focus on a deep understanding of the startup ecosystem. Therefore, they help business leaders create and launch custom software in various verticals and industries.

The company's value and core vision is to turn vision into results and transform the industry through quality software engineering. 

Similarly, the approaches of this highly qualified company are complete and comprehensive: 

Consulting

An innovative and constantly developing digital environment requires constant improvement of most digital products. Whether it is a mobile application or a corporate platform, all of these require IT consulting on development strategy. After all, this is one of the most promising ways to achieve profitability of investment and modernization.

Consulting in digital products is primarily needed to scale and adapt to market trends and needs. Therefore, the consulting direction of Artkai experts is based on IT specifics for digital products and applications. For example, during the consulting process in the <a href="https://artkai.io/works/dna-payments-an-intelligent-payment-ecosystem">DNA Payments Platform</a>, it was decided to modernize the payment system and the <a href="https://artkai.io/works/hcp-portal-redesign-for-roche-switzerland">HCP Portal</a> and carry out a complex redesign.

This publication is an overview of the role of IT consulting in modernizing digital products based on our 9-year experience. And how, based on many years of practice, building a product strategy and consulting ensured the effectiveness of developing and modernizing digital solutions.

How Artkai performs strategy consulting

Product strategy consulting for existing products focuses primarily on analyzing what has already been done. In our work, we have encountered outdated architecture, inefficient UI and UX, and many technical limitations that slowed down product development and the profitability of our clients' companies.

Our product strategy consultants' main focus is identifying weaknesses in digital products and developing an effective strategy for their renewal. 

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Let's discuss Artkai's <a href="https://artkai.io/blog/tech-consulting-for-businesses">tech consulting services</a> in more detail.

Effective product strategy consulting should always start with in-depth product and UX analysis, as this is where barriers are most often found. Our product strategy consultants assess how well your product meets business goals and user needs. 

This part involves following several important steps to ensure a complete assessment and a real-world situation for product validation.

Stakeholder Interviews involve detailed stakeholder interviews to identify and analyze essential business metrics, strategic priorities, and user experience expectations.

Market & Competitor Analysis involves researching the market and competitors' activities to identify best practices before developing strategies.

Heuristic Evaluation is an expert analysis that allows you to assess the interface's compliance with the basic usability principles, such as consistency and standards, usability, support, etc.

Usability Testing includes testing the product by real users using heatmaps, session recordings, and eye-tracking to identify navigation and functional issues.

Customer Journey Mapping to analyze user interaction points.

Analytics Review & Data-Driven Hypotheses from bounce rate and conversion rate to retention to identify behavioral patterns and form UX hypotheses.

User feedback involves collecting and analyzing direct feedback, reviews, and support requests to identify pain points and areas for improvement.

Prioritization and a roadmap that outlines the most essential and promising product features.

A/B testing will verify the effectiveness of the design and functional solutions and allow for further product optimization.

The outcome is comprehensive documentation that includes a strategic roadmap, actionable insights, and a range of potential approaches for enhancing the product.

Strategic Roadmap & Tech Architecture Consulting 

Next comes the stage of building a roadmap and technology strategy.  Pay attention to several points, such as why your business needs Legacy app modernization and how product strategy consultants can help with product strategy. 

Depending on the technical state and business goals, you can use the following approaches to modernization: 

Encapsulation with the removal of certain functions of the legacy system into modular API services. This will allow you to integrate them into new products without completely replacing the code.

Rehosting with the transfer of the application to the cloud infrastructure or virtual environment without changing the functionality will significantly reduce server costs.

Refactoring with optimization and restructuring of the code to improve performance. 

Replatforming with updating individual components, databases, and frameworks and preserving the main functionality.

Containerization & Microservices Adoption involves dividing monolithic applications into microservices and deploying them in Docker or Kubernetes.

DevOps & CI/CD Implementation with automation of deployment processes and implementation of DevOps practices for accelerated development cycles.

Security and compliance Modernization includes security audits, updating encryption standards, and ensuring compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 regulatory requirements to protect user data.

Or a complete rebuild with a complete rewrite of the product code on new technologies. 

A high-level <a href="https://artkai.io/blog/a-roadmap-to-developing-a-top-notch-business-application">roadmap provides</a> an additional opportunity to consider in detail the main points on how a business can effectively manage the technological development of its product and plan for its upgrade without losses.

To implement your product strategy, we offer CTO as a Service (CaaS), which provides access to our technical product strategy consultants who advise on technology, architecture, and product development strategy.

This collaboration process includes:

Integration into the client's team to assess the technical component.

Analyze workflows to eliminate weaknesses.

Joint definition of technologies to ensure efficiency, scalability, and relevance to the target audience. 

With a comprehensive approach, you can expect positive feedback from the target audience and ultimately exceed customer expectations. That's why product strategy consulting is a powerful tool for your business, which results in a competitive advantage in the digital market. 

The business value of product strategy services

The chaotic addition of functionality to a working product without a product strategy, market research, and a built business model wastes time and resources. You need a comprehensive vision of a team of niche specialists to conduct an in-depth analysis and identify the audience's and competitors' needs because the company's internal specialists can only pinpoint the problems and pain points of the existing product strategy. 

To this end, external expertise is needed to take a fresh look at the situation and offer business objectives that will give your product a competitive advantage for long-term success. 

Now, let's take a closer look at the value of a well-built product strategy as a result of working with product strategy consultants:

Efficiency is a key success factor for most digital products. Product strategy consulting is designed to improve development processes, shorten SDLCs, and optimize resources without compromising the existing business strategy. 

The value of a consultancy approach is:

Analysing business processes and technology architecture to eliminate unnecessary costs.

Implementing CI/CD for release efficiency.

Agile and Lean methodologies to reduce development costs and ensure a quick time to market.

Thus, as a result, your company does not waste resources; instead, it directs them to innovation and product strategy. 

Decision uncertainty can significantly slow the workflow and lead to significant technological limitations, non-compliance with regulatory requirements, and low company adaptability. In this case, product strategy consultants can help to identify risks at the initial stages of cooperation and mitigate them.

Analysing market trends and target audience to predict the impact of external factors on the product.

Creating contingency plans to respond quickly to changes.

A proactive approach will ensure your business is innovative, provides quality services, and achieves the expected results. Because it will provide a solid foundation for high-market positions. 

As a company grows, its product must be ready for new business tasks and roles. However, without a high-quality product strategy, scaling can become a failure with huge losses.  Therefore, if you lack a well-constructed strategy, working with product strategy consultants is the way to go.

Their strategic direction may include:

Using Cloud-Native solutions to improve performance and availability.

Integration of Auto Scaling & Load Balancing) for stable operation under changing loads.

Optimisation of DevOps processes to speed up the release of updates.

This will ensure the stability of your company's internal processes.

If your digital product is of high quality, it affects conversions. Product consulting helps businesses ensure quality standards and avoid technical limitations.

Key strategies of product strategy consultants:

Integrating UX Research & Heuristic Evaluation to optimize User Experience

Implementing Application Performance Monitoring

An integrated quality control approach helps minimize technical errors and increase user satisfaction.

A successful product strategy involves effective development and financial results. Optimized processes, scalability, and product quality create a sustainable business model that ensures long-term profitability.

Therefore, strategic consulting affects the following financial indicators:

Improving User Retention and Customer Lifetime Value

That is why we emphasize that product strategy consulting is the basis for product modernization and scaling, especially during a slowdown and low profits. 

However, it's also worth reminding you that introducing new functionality, changing the company's internal processes, and other processes related to updating product strategy can also become a stumbling block for businesses if done chaotically. 

Next, let's analyse the main obstacles for companies in updating and scaling their product strategy and business in general. Consider what can stop your competitiveness and how to avoid becoming a hostage to processes. 

Implementing a product strategy may sound easy in words, but it's quite the opposite in practice. This can be explained by the fact that the problems of neglecting strategic analysis, market mismatch, and inefficient resource allocation are not as superficial as they might seem at first glance. 

When you look deeper into this issue, the problems lie in the readiness for change and the speed of its implementation.

The rapid dynamics of the digital market can lead to the irrelevance of your product and the loss of top positions. For example, if you don't systematically research market trends and analyze emerging technologies, you can assume that no one will need your services in a few years or even earlier. 

What does product strategy consulting do in this case?

It uses continuous discovery to constantly update the product vision.

Competitive analysis to identify market changes.

Adapts to agile methodologies to quickly adapt strategies.

When your product expands too quickly to include features that were not originally envisaged, it will increase costs and blur the team's focus. This may also indicate the presence of management problems. Moreover, feature bloat can overload a product with unnecessary features that won't bring value to users. 

How product strategy can solve this issue:

Formulate an MVP scope and identify core features.

Implement prioritization frameworks for feature selection.

Include road mapping tools for strategic backlog management. 

This approach will focus on working with core features without long delays and rationally using resources.

A new product strategy may initially be uncomfortable for most of your company's employees, and this may be accompanied by resistance. After all, change is always about learning new things and changing approaches. 

Approach of product strategy consultants:

Conduct stakeholder mapping to identify the prominent participants in the process.

Apply Change Management Frameworks to implement changes step by step.

Organize workshops and alignment meetings to engage teams.

Thus, the gradual nature of this process provides awareness and logic of the processes, which leads to effective team interaction. 

It should be noted that critical attention should be paid to product strategy to find a balance between long-term goals and short-term benefits. Therefore, the priority should be sustainable development without compromising further scaling. 

Also, if your company is just planning to launch a new product, Artkai's product strategy consultants <a href="https://artkai.io/services/product-strategy-consulting">can provide professional support</a> tailored to your needs and capabilities.

Of course, the most complete understanding of product strategy consulting features comes through specific examples. 

The following section will reveal the nuances of Artkai's consulting approach and how it affects the business growth of particular companies.

Case Studies: Consulting by Artkai in Action

For our specialists, product strategy consulting is based on in-depth market research, focusing on continuous improvement and product validation. Only after that can we start building a complete roadmap that will offer solutions for working with the product. 

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This is an innovative payment system of DNA Payments Group, which includes nine companies. The project's goal was a fundamental redesign that would make the portal attractive and user-friendly. 

The Artkai team's approach and product strategy were based on conducting user research with competitor identification to identify weaknesses in existing processes and redesigning the main parts in terms of UI and UX.

After creating the product roadmap, several key tasks were set:

Creating new onboarding for users - a process that allowed users to familiarise themselves with the product quickly and start using most of it features 

Development of a mobile version of the platform - for greater user convenience, higher security level, market coverage, and increased transaction volume. 

Redesign of the existing platform - to optimize conversion, achieve higher scalability, modernize outdated interfaces, and increase productivity among the user audience.

To ensure that the improvements were consistent, our specialists worked in several stages:

Desk research, where we got acquainted with the project and provided advice on product strategy.

Interviews with stakeholders as part of a consultation for user research and alignment with business objectives.

Audit of the current product to identify pain points.

Development of user profiles to better understand their needs and expectations. 

Customer Journey Mapping to identify key interactions.

Backlog preparation and prioritization. 

Only after that we started the redesign, which yielded results.

By the end of 2022, DNA Payments served more than 65,000 merchants and was on track to become the UK's fourth-largest payment service provider.

A wide range of payment solutions to meet business requirements, with transactions processed through 100,000 terminals and checkout pages.

18% growth in the number of new users during the first few months after the redesign;

2.3-fold reduction in the churn rate during the first two weeks of interaction with the platform.

Resources that make sense

Top Software Development Companies in 2025

Product Strategy Consulting: Its Role in App Modernization Process

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