Every business founder, CTO, CEO, or product owner has to find the right product development strategy to suit their company’s business goals.
There are lots of different product development strategies out there and no real one size fits all rule when it comes to product management and development.
One definite thing is that the complete product development strategy is crucial for any business if it wants to get out ahead of the competition by building a better product.
Startups move faster, collaborate better and aren’t trapped by corporate bureaucracy or hidebound ways of thinking. But if you want your company or business units to act more like startups in their software development process, it helps to understand how startups really work and at what stages of their development. As you adopt the things that work for startups, you’ll need to be cognizant that your business units will need to grow and mature just like successful startups do.
Here are six ideas to innovate like a startup while avoiding common startup pitfalls:
1. Form smaller teams with leaders that carry a deep product understanding and are steeped in innovation ideas.
Amazon famously popularized the “two-pizza rule” in its early days. If you couldn’t feed the people in your meeting with two pizzas, you had too many people in the project for it to be productive.
The same holds true when forming product and development teams. Six to eight people on a team is plenty; five is even better for faster decision-making and higher productivity. Just make sure you have the right leaders in place for these teams. Team leaders at this stage or size have to be hands-on player-coaches who are innovative thinkers, passionate about understanding the solution and eager to interact with end users to collect feedback.
2. Listen to your customers (clients)
You can’t have a successful software development initiative without understanding customers’ pain points and how other tools in the market are failing to meet those needs.
Don’t be afraid to allow your customers to participate in the innovation process as opposed to developing solutions in search of problems. This will also help you to take your products to where the market opportunity is and avoid the single-product mindset, instead developing complementary product lines on the same codebase.
3. Measure success based on innovation, not on people or budgets.
Since you’ll be keeping your teams small and lean like any startup worth its salt, staff and budget numbers shouldn’t be the defining barrier. Innovation is the only metric that counts. Are you expanding your product’s capabilities? Are you introducing new technology into the market before the competition? Are you reusing software assets to develop new product lines and move beyond the single-product mindset?
Creating the right culture and right talent to lead at this stage is critical for companies to continue to innovate, drive results and more importantly, establish a strong “product culture.” Following this course provides a foundation for a single-product company to be able to expand to a multi-product company and continue to maintain its startup culture as well as a fast pace of innovation.
4. Put a process in place that allows for continuous innovation and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
Modern agile software development requires constant updates as new features are added, tested and put into production. This process requires building a CI/CD pipeline. You establish the source code for a development project, build the software using your tool of choice, test the software to make sure it’s behaving properly and free of coding errors and, finally, deploy the software once it’s passed quality control. As you make daily changes and updates, you go through this routine continuously.
You can automate this process, using commercial or open source tools, and avoid errors that turn into bugs. Customers appreciate your innovation and ideas and expect you to be able to solve problems for them that other firms haven’t figured out yet — but they still need your product to work.
5. Use solution-minded development techniques along with agile.
Agile development methods are great for supporting collaboration among remote teams, responding to changes faster, creating a feedback loop for continuous improvement and generally speeding up the product development lifecycle. This allows for a ton of features to be developed in short order.
As the company gets a chance to establish the early customer base for its product, processes tighten and become more disciplined. The startup now must manage the innovation cycle in SaaS in context with maintaining product quality and delivering the product to the customer efficiently.
When the innovation cycles are short and new features are added rapidly, it is critically important to tie the innovation cycle to a solution. This is where the traditional software development approach still has its place, especially in terms of setting out the solution context and persona of the end user. You can still use agile sprints, but with controls in place for solution validation so that the final software you develop looks more like what you set out to do and what your customers want.
6. Foster a spirit of collaboration between product management and product marketing.
Once you’ve developed a new product, you need to make sure that it resonates with buyers and shows them how it can solve their pain points. This is where product marketing comes in.
Getting your product management and product marketing teams on the same page will lead to better alignment of vision, strategy and tactics and make you more responsive to your customers’ needs. Product marketing principles will provide a strong wrapper around the product development and make the end users appreciate the rapid development cycle to meet their feature demands.
Adopting some of the best traits of startups can help any development organization to raise their innovation game, become more responsive to customers and bring products to market faster. But startups have enough of a track record now to know what works and what doesn’t. The above steps should give you a baseline to form innovation centers inside your organization, improve your customer relations and gain new relevancy in the market.
Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) Application Development: Revolutionizing Business Solutions In the realm of application development, businesses traditionally faced two options: purchasing pre-made…
Are you facing challenges in finding the ideal software development partner for your project? The abundance of options can make…
Outsourcing software development has emerged as a cost-effective solution for numerous businesses, allowing them to optimize expenses without compromising project…
Mojo is a sophisticated predictive modeling technology developed by H2O.ai, the company renowned for its popular open-source machine learning platform,…
The emergence of remote work has ushered in a transformative employment landscape. A global phenomenon, millions of individuals worldwide have…
Determining the cost of software development is an essential preliminary step prior to embarking on its construction. It is imperative…
Offshore software development is a form of outsourcing where companies engage third-party software providers located in distant countries to handle…
The media industry, like many others, is undergoing a significant transformation due to the advent of digital technologies. This digital…
As the digital landscape continues to advance, businesses must adapt their strategies to keep up with the evolving trends. In…
Retail digital transformation refers to the strategic integration of technology into retail operations with the goal of improving efficiency, customer…
English 
Vietnamese
I don’t think the title of your article matches the content lol. Just kidding, mainly because I had some doubts after reading the article.
Hi there, thanks for reading our blog posts. I am always happy to answer any questions you have about the article
Can you be more specific about the content of your article? After reading it, I still have some doubts. Hope you can help me.
Hi there, thanks for reading our blog posts. I am always happy to answer any questions you have about the article. Please leave a comment.
After reading your article, I have some doubts about gate.io. I don’t know if you’re free? I would like to consult with you. thank you.
It’s our pleasure to help you with your problems. Just leave your question so we will try to give some advice. Thanks for your attention!
Reading your article has greatly helped me, and I agree with you. But I still have some questions. Can you help me? I will pay attention to your answer. thank you.
Your article gave me a lot of inspiration, I hope you can explain your point of view in more detail, because I have some doubts, thank you.
Thanks for paying attention to our blog. Our consultation is free so you can leave your questions here and we will try to answer them asap.
Your article gave me a lot of inspiration, I hope you can explain your point of view in more detail, because I have some doubts, thank you.
Thanks for paying attention to our blog. Our consultation is free so you can leave your questions here and we will try to answer them asap.