Innovation at the speed of market trends
On average, a new Product that sells needs 18 months to develop, another 12 months to maintain, thus a total of 5 years to sustain and scale out and become a mature product.
Here, “a new product that sells” mean, not the upgrade version nor the 100% fully spec just need to convert into code, nor product with very low users. There might be a concern about using new technology and a faster development lifecycle, to make the time taken shorter. But at least need to invest time to know the problem the product going to solve, choose the right market, plan the go-to-market business model, channel building, many trial and error in technology and solutions that involved, not only fixing the bug in the code.
Hit products are like butterfly, been praised by everyone around it. Like butterfly it take time from caterpillars to turn into butterflies.
What if, the market trend change during your 18 months of incubation?
Needless to say, this is one of the worse scenarios for a development team, find out late about the trend have shifted. There is an endless risk, like competitor rollout alike product, the challenge of main technology used, issues with trust within the team, ever-changing customer’s taste, legal & compliance changes, mentally burnout, dry bank account, …
Err, enough pessimistic in this pandemic, let’s think brighter side. And some solutions.
Leverage Available Technology
A decade ago, applications need a developer to write code days and nights. These days, there are tons of low code no code framework that let you create applications. A decade ago, you have to set up your servers that host the codes, administering the database and busy with days to days operation. These days, just use APIs, hosted database, platform as a service and orchestration tools. A decade ago, you have to build marketing, sales management, customer support by yourself. These days, just use a SaaS app that can start working on the same day you sign up.
Choose your Market landscape
Product — market match is important for every product development company. If the product doesn’t match the market, no user, what for? The worst case is market give negative feedback. There are possible that wrong market, but most of the time it is the main problem the product tries to solve is not in line with the reality on the ground.
Picking up either the Enterprise market or the Consumer market is also tough, it is more the decision of which market you want to serve. Because the product features and nature is different. Even the Enterprise market, big corporation and Small and Medium business market are different. They are different not only product features and quality, but also the channel used to reach the customers, values perceived from customers, expected support response, self-serviceable, price structure, and customizability.
Sensing Emerging Trends
Newer Technology creates new products. Look at the internet. Because of internet, it comes with a product made in internet world like Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, YouTube, Netflix. Otherwise, we might live a different lifestyle of communicating, buying, entertaining. Because of 3G and touch screen married with mobile phone, there comes smartphone (iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, etc). And then App.
Some trends depend on user experience, without prior experience you might not prefer the next hit product. When iPhone was out, for sure it was better than blackberry and Nokia, but without blackberry and Nokia user might not able to relate to what Steve Jobs was doing with his demonstration. Or even Steve Jobs won’t come with that game-changing presentation.
Also in the game industry, titles that favour network, strategy, VR, or AR is also the shift in trends. So does game consoles: from TV projection, joystick, handheld, VR headset, to AR and wearable, we can see the trends go along with technology and experience.
The emerging trends can see in Enterprise product also. Buy once use lifetime shift to pay-as-you-goes, buy to own shift to Software-as-a-Service, on-premise shift to the cloud. Once independent IT products have become more interconnected, integrable, autonomous with Machine Learning to give ubiquitous experience.
We can only predict & say it is Amazing but don’t know what exactly Quantum computing, Artificial Intelligence, AR &VR, Blockchain, and Neural Network can bring to us.
Predicting Future
Although I cannot predict what will happen tomorrow, I do want the program inside the computer to predict the future with the data feeds. The Predicting Future is around us for a while, just remember we watch the weather forecast on TV every day, even we all have experience of prediction come out not as expected.
In the new world business with advancement of IT, Prediction is the reason why we are doing with developing system, data warehousing, data science workbench, tons of analysis, visualization, and get the result in term of business decision support insights.
Business is building their expert system with data feeds, the more data you have, the more prediction you can with the help of data science and AI on the future, which in turn bring you more profitability, then you will have more power to get data from a wider perspective. The circle goes on, and the business will be almost like God.
Validate Your Solution
On the journey to make a good and sustainable product, Validate the solution in every step is unavoidable steps. Validation is not the testing phase at the end of production before UAT, it is too late the product might not have features to solve the problem because the market trend is dynamic.
Before actual spending, a few months of development process should validate the solution sure to solve the problem. Validate at an early stage, while time and money spending are low. validate along the process, and don’t lose track of the problem.
Process
Most issues with the business application are related to the actual business process on the ground, not the binary information in the application product. The process issue is easier to talk about than solve. There are many reluctances to change the process that has been accustom to doing.
The innovative solution will use product and process change together to solve problems effectively.
As the market trends and needs of the customer are always changing, the development process must be agile. Specification features, data source, workflow, API pipeline might change anytime, and the project manager should be agile with this. Usually, this area can only be well explained along with the timeline, dynamically.
build roadmaps, white paper, community involvement
While you have a product ready to go to market, one way of spreading is through building trust and involvement with customer. This method is much effective than spending a high budget on marketing activities like advertising campaign and launch party that go nowhere. There should be marketing activities but awareness won’t let the customer pay for it, let alone loyalty.
In the tech world, with the roadmaps, customers know what to be expected, and support the product with better points in comparison to competitors. Sharing underline technology in white paper ways drew scholar and researcher to the table and can inline perspective of problem-solving. Red Hat start with the community edition flavour of Linux and become one of the most famous examples of open source software that also have commercial success.
Total Cost of Ownership
Building a good product doesn’t stop at just when the product is ready to use. But development team usually burnout at this stage. Maintaining the code is as much important as building the first release. Maybe 200% more important. Along with user feedback, features might be enhanced, weakness need to be overcome, bugs might need to be fixed.
User report needs to provide proper support, tracking each report and close the ticket, if they are paying customer, otherwise, revenue will be affected. Then comes the need for manpower assign to the support team, and this better is all aspect from sales, implementation, support, development.
Customer support calls should not be dead-end at the call centre, going nowhere solving nothing. They should be treated as valuable insight, help to understand the experience, market trends and customers’ real needs.
So the process of Maintaining the products and user support might need to put in the part of the business. The cost of operating this become the total cost of ownership. It’s vital and without this part, products cannot be a success.
Last words
Development process and technology need to innovate, in line with broader aspect, act timely to deliver products that were needed by the market. Early-bird, with innovation, get the worm!
