Consulting

March 07, 2025

Product Strategy Consulting: Its Role in App Modernization Process

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 DNA Payments Platform, it was decided to modernize the payment system and the HCP Portal 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 In our work, we have encountered outdated architecture, inefficient UI and UX, and many technical limitations that slowed down product development and the profitability of our clients' companies.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.

Let's discuss Artkai's tech consulting services in more detail.

In-Depth Product and UX Analysis

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 roadmap provides 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.

CTO as a Service & Expert Collaboration

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:

Streamlined Processes and Reduced Costs

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.

Risk Mitigation

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.

This happens through:

Conducting a technical audit.
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.

Scalability and Flexibility

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.

Enhanced Product Quality

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.

Higher Profit & Revenue

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
Reducing Customer Acquisition Cost
Optimising Revenue Streams
Increasing conversion.

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.

Product Strategy Risks and Issues

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.

Market Adaptation Risks

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.

Scope & Feature Alignment

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.

Navigating Organisational Resistance

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 can provide professional support 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.

Intelligent payment ecosystem

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.

In the work of our specialists, the priority of this project was competitive analysis, which helped product strategy consultants build a solid plan for a successful redesign.

HCP Redesign for Roche

The project aimed to modernize Roche Switzerland's HCP Portal, addressing issues such as complex navigation and slow access to critical information for healthcare professionals.

Before starting the project, we offered our client to conduct product strategy consulting to help define business objectives and product strategy and what a complete redesign could solve.

Therefore, we defined the following goals and objectives:

Analysis and audit, which included user research to identify weaknesses in the system.
Data collection, where we interviewed key user groups and stakeholders to understand their goals and needs.
Product strategy development, where we formed redesign concepts that would meet the needs of users and Roche's business goals.
Implementation of changes, with a focus on long-term success and usability of the updated UX/UI design.

After four months of productive work on the project, we positively exceeded customer expectations. This significantly improved the platform's navigation and overall usability, provided specialists with quick access to the necessary information, and significantly optimized their work.

Main achievements:

A user experience that is updated to reflect daily needs and workflows.
Increased engagement, as evidenced by increased traffic and activity.
Stakeholder satisfaction, as the portal fully meets the needs of both internal and external users, supports Roche’s core strategic goal.

Wrap-Up

Product development, scaling, and optimization should be an ongoing, mandatory part of your business. Product strategy consulting should go hand-in-hand with the processes mentioned above. After all, a fresh look and analysis of your business values will help you build a solid foundation for long-term success.

Our team has been helping many companies with strategic consulting for many years. Our priority is to identify the most profitable areas of development that will take your business to the next level, so if your business needs a new expert approach, don't hesitate to contact us.