The future of product development
- Asad Naqvi
- Jul 15, 2019
- 4 min read
The world is moving faster every day. No, that’s not just a cliché, it’s a fact! The first personal computers arrived around 40 years ago, and today, it seems nearly everyone is gazing at a glowing, handheld computer. Technological innovation is an iterative process where each generation of technology improves over the last, thus increasing the rate of progress from version to version. Thus, the need for innovation is constant and more demanding than ever. Product development, just like any other field, faces similar challenges.
What is product development?
Product development is the creation and improvement of product, across industries, to add more value add service for the end customers. The process of understanding what services to incorporate is an ongoing process that cannot exist in vacuum. It’s an integral part of a product that should be re visited frequently throughout the lifecycle of the product. However, the cardinal rule remains the same for all products: to increase the market share of the specific entity by satisfying consumer demands. Let’s take a look at some of the interesting trends that might dictate the way we develop and deliver software in the future.
1. More data and increased customer interactivity
Intelligent interfaces represent what Deloitte calls the “next great technology transformation”: enabling capabilities from tracking customers offline habits and personalizing new products and solutions to enhancing operational efficiency and personal productivity. This blend of human-centered design with near-frictionless interfaces currently leverages conversational technologies and, in the future, will likely include computer vision, gesture control, embedded eye-tracking, bio-acoustic sensing, and emotion detection. These systems can also help collect copious amount of customer related data that will help guide information based decisions and develop functionalities aimed at offering seamless customer experiences.
2. Predictive product development
A few years ago, all that mattered was developing a functioning product that would deliver specialized services to another business. Teams would spend a substantial amount of time developing an enterprise solution that would rarely meeting the customer demands. However, the landscape has drastically changed today. Now, companies must be ready to adapt every single day, understand the predictive evolution of products, and create products that incorporate their current and future functionalities. It’s not good enough to come up with a product that can only perform a single service. Instead, enterprise solutions are dictated by a common product vision that includes creating a product that can be evolved to meeting the increasingly challenging customer demands. That’s why product evolution and the ability to predict what users will need from a specific product is vital in a modern product development process. In fact, a thorough understanding of the product evolution process is essential in order for corporations to keep the product fresh, dynamic, and relevant in the future.
3. NoOps
With the growing reliance on cloud providers, IT organizations are now seeking to create a “NoOps” (no operations) landscape. "NoOps" is a theoretical concept that considers an IT environment is completely automated and abstracted from the underlying infrastructure negating the need for a dedicated in house team to manage software development operations. While there is active skepticism regarding the extent to which organization can automate software development and deployment, “NoOps” seems to be the logical progression for enterprises seeking more automated ways to release their features in production. Web-scale companies, which lack decades of accumulated IT infrastructure and processes, have pioneered approaches that rely heavily on public cloud infrastructure and tools. As a result, we now have containers filled with micro services running in a server less architecture. Developers are comfortable deploying their own code, and with rolling it back if necessary in a “fail fast” approach, rather than waiting on a cumbersome change management process for approval.
4. Outsourcing:
Outsourcing product development services still remains a sticky topic among many product managers. Nonetheless, it is an important trend in product development. Outsourcing helps companies focus on their core business by tapping low cost IT development to effective locations. The benefits of outsourcing product development are clear, which means corporations are now ready to embrace a once-maligned business practice. Businesses are now fully aware that they don’t have the resources needed to take care of all the different aspects of product development, which includes design analysis, product design, prototyping, documentation, and manufacturing. However, a successful outsourcing strategy is highly dependent on effective communication, increased transparency and a healthy overlap of skills and work culture between the client and vendor.
5. Distributed teams:
I work in an organization, where my stakeholders are scattered all over the globe and consist of a large amount of "Remote Workers". As tech companies across the globe recognize the importance of providing a fair amount of flexibility to their employees and trends like “WFH” and “Remote Worker” become more mainstream, the task to build a practical processes for a healthy interaction between these distributed teams becomes increasingly more real. This also means that the highly advanced collaborative tools like (Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc) would become more relent in bringing teams and data to work closer together.
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