The 'high value product' optional criterion is one of the most powerful for founders and lead engineers — but scale alone isn't enough. Here is what makes a product an evidence anchor.
One of the five optional criteria for Global Talent endorsement asks whether you have "built a high value product or service that has demonstrated commercial success and made a meaningful impact on the digital technology sector." This criterion is specifically designed for people who have built something — and when your evidence is strong here, it can carry an entire optional criterion with minimal additional documentation.
The question is: what makes a digital product meet this standard?
A digital product qualifies under this criterion when it demonstrates three things simultaneously:
Commercial validation. The product has users, customers, or revenue — not in development, not in beta, but deployed and used by real people or organisations with measurable results. The metrics that work: monthly active users (with context about what that means in your sector), paying customer count, revenue, growth rate.
Sector-level significance. The product isn't just successful — it represents a meaningful contribution to the digital technology sector. This means: it does something that either didn't exist before, solves a problem that existing approaches couldn't address, or has changed how a segment of users or the industry approaches a problem.
Independent recognition. Other people — not you or your company — have publicly acknowledged that the product is significant. This can be press, investor backing, industry awards, or letters from customers who explain specifically why the product mattered to them.
The combination of all three is what makes this criterion strong. Commercial success alone (a profitable but incremental app) doesn't pass. Innovation without adoption doesn't pass. Adoption without recognition doesn't pass as strongly. Together, they create the full picture.
This is the dimension most applicants struggle to articulate. "We had 500,000 users" is a commercial metric. "Our product changed how 500,000 users in the UK manage their finances — moving them from a behaviour pattern dominated by bank overdrafts to a savings-first model, with measurable improvements in their financial outcomes" is meaningful sector impact.
The impact argument requires you to connect your metrics to a broader change in behaviour, practice, or the market. Questions to ask yourself:
For a strong product evidence submission:
The customer letter format is particularly powerful here. A letter from an enterprise customer that says: "Before X's product, we handled Y process with Z approach, which cost us N time and M money per period. After adopting X, we changed to W approach, reducing our time by T% and saving us approximately £X annually — and achieving an outcome (describe outcome) that wasn't previously possible" — that is sector impact documented by a credible independent third party.
There's no official user or revenue threshold for this criterion. The relevant question is whether your scale is meaningful in the context of your sector and market.
A B2B fintech product used by 50 enterprise banks is sector-level impact regardless of absolute user count. A B2C consumer app with 10,000 users may not be, even though the absolute number is larger.
Context and framing matter more than absolute numbers. Position your scale relative to the market you're serving and the problem you're solving.
For founders, this criterion addresses your company's product and your role in conceiving and building it. For lead engineers who didn't found the company, the criterion requires more careful framing: you need to demonstrate your specific contribution to the product's significance, not just that the product is significant. The evidence here comes largely from letters — colleagues, founders, and customers who can describe your specific contribution to the product's innovation and impact.
Want to know if your product qualifies as evidence under this criterion? The free readiness assessment maps your evidence across all criteria and gives you a clear, scored view of where you stand.
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