A modern market works according to the “Become the first or lose” principle. The world was slower 50-70 years ago, so businesses concentrated on making the best product on the market rather than doing it among the first. But times have changed, and early product launches are now more important than perfect launches.
Now, users are looking for a relatively good (8/10) product that fits modern trends rather than an almost perfect but outdated product. It especially relates to software development. If your product is outdated, the user will mark it as 6/10, even if it is perfect from all other sides. That’s why we want to share tips on creating a great product with minimum time to market, increasing your chances of becoming a trendsetter in your niche!
What Is Speed to Market, and Why Should You Care?
Speed to market is the time it takes for a product or service to go from conception to commercialization stages. Accenture’s research shows that most effective businesses use all tech capabilities that they possibly get.
It allows them to stay ahead of competitors, increasing effectiveness and profitability even during the recession. They launch new products and features faster than rivals and take away their clients.
Check 5 market opportunities that you can unlock with faster time to market:
- Competitive Advantage: People are naturally interested in trying something new, so reduced time to market gives you a great advantage.
- Market Share: Early entry can help you capture a larger market share before competitors can establish themselves.
- Customer Satisfaction: Quick delivery can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Revenue Growth: Faster time-to-market can lead to increased revenue and profitability.
- Risk Mitigation: By getting your product to market sooner, you can reduce the risk of market changes or competitor actions.
Long story short, if you have great speed to market, it demonstrates that you are an adaptive business willing to try something new to make your clients feel better. It’s a green flag that you can show up to increase your company’s reputation.
3 Proven Product Development Types With the Fastest Time to Market
Currently, there are only 3 common product development types that allow you to release a quality product fast enough. Each of them has its specifics that may or may not suit you. Reach out to Corpsoft Solutions experts so we can help you find the approach that perfectly suits your needs.
Rapid Prototyping
In this case, you create a minimum valuable product (MVP) to test its feasibility. Maybe the market isn’t ready for it, or you need to completely modify it before releasing it. And these situations are completely fine in software development!
The rapid prototyping approach allows you to test the software and gather feedback on whether the market needs it now in the shortest possible time. To reduce development time even more, you can rapidly prototype multiple products to determine the best option for today. If people like the product, you can focus on a single product to make it almost perfect.
This approach suits risky projects where you don’t feel confident enough to focus on them. Once you see that people are interested in a product, you may focus on it.
Agile Development
Agile methodology emphasizes iterative development (when a big project splits into a series of small interactions), teamwork, and customer satisfaction. Unlike more traditional methods, agile focuses on delivering working software in short cycles (3-4 weeks long), known as sprints, and adapting to changing requirements.
It prioritizes effective collaboration and communication among team members. It suits constantly changing industries, where demands for a product may change overnight because of some disruptive Google or Apple feature.
Most Agile teams use at least one of those frameworks:
- Scrum: A popular framework that uses sprints, daily stand-ups, and review meetings to manage development.
- Kanban: A visual system that focuses on visualizing work, limiting work in progress, and continuously improving.
- Extreme Programming (XP): A disciplined approach that emphasizes pair programming, test-driven development, and continuous integration.
In the classic waterfall approach, you need to wait until the team finishes the development, and only after that can you ask them to revise the service. It will take time and money since you must pay for a lengthy editing process.
But Agile makes it easier. If you realize you need to modify your product drastically, just notify the team. They will start thinking about how to change the app and focus on new features almost instantly. In the next sprint review, you’ll see how they implement your new ideas. So, you’ll reduce time to market and spend far less money than the traditional waterfall approach.
Parallel Development
In the parallel method, a company uses multiple teams that work with different components of the system. Later, they simply combine their results into a single project. It’s a great approach for large projects, as no one needs to wait until the other team ends their tasks. In the long run, it can save even months of work.
Meanwhile, you need to plan for each development aspect to ensure that no one overlaps with other members. So, you should be a PRO in resource allocation and dependency management.
9 Tips to Improve Speed to Market
We know that application development is a complex process. That’s why we’ve gathered 9 tips that can help you launch a product faster than you expect:
- Build initial strategy
- Focus on customer’s pain points
- Embrace Agile
- Leverage automation
- Implement a low-code/no-code solutions
- Try BaaS solutions
- Consider outsourcing
- Track your results
Accept that not everything will go according to plan.
Build your initial strategy
First things first, analyze your business, market, and target audience. Articulate your goals, conduct a SWOT analysis, and define your objectives. If you don’t know the desired outcome, how could you plan to get to it? Identify your goals with the SMART scheme:
- Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve.
- Measurable: All goals should be quantified and tracked
- Achievable: Ensure your goals are realistic and attainable.
- Relevant: Make sure your goals contribute to your long-term success.
- Time-bound: Set a specific deadline for achieving your goals.
Since the modern market is constantly changing, you should have multiple similar yet different road maps for your product launch. It’s better to keep Plan B and Plan C unused rather than spend time and nerves trying to come up with them during stressful events.
Focus on Customer’s Pain Points
All you need to do is to solve the customer’s pain. You don’t need to be the fastest or fanciest on the market. It is still good to achieve it, but even Microsoft and Google developers use the “good enough” philosophy, concentrating on making great products and spending adequate resources on them rather than spending eternity on perfection.
You can still make your product perfect later. Don’t be so harsh on yourself during the development process. Conduct customer research to determine what your potential customers are looking for. Identify their emotions and possible plans. Later, range those “pain points” by using the “Urgent/Important” matrix.
Once you know how to determine urgent and important tasks, do just that. Don’t get over your head during the release. We remind you that a simple tool that solves all customers’ pain points is times better than a tool overcrowded with irrelevant features.
Embrace Agile Methodologies:
Agile development methodology suits businesses of any size and helps them to reduce time to market. If you use agile methods, you’ll get the fastest feedback from the developer team and customers. It means that you’ll have more information than your rivals. And who owns information owns the world.
You can detect potential problems even before they become obvious. You’ll get the latest insights among the first. While companies with traditional developing approaches will need to wait months even to begin the implementation of new knowledge, agile teams embrace changes almost instantly. This work ethic accelerates product development, allowing you to constantly update your product, making it the best on the market.
Leverage Automation
Automation of routine tedious tasks saves you time, increasing the speed to market. Current technologies allow you to automate creative tasks like scripting for social media videos, research for blog posts, etc. Countless services can help you to draw sketches and even edit videos.
If we speak about software development, dozens of tools can act as a copilot and optimize your code. You can simplify deployment and tests, ensure advanced data management, workflow scripting, etc.
You can even save on the customer support team by leveraging conversational AI-based chatbots. Later, you can connect it to your Live Chat, mailing services, and social accounts. It unlocks endless market opportunities for your business.
Implement a Low-Code/No-Code Platform for Compliance
If you have a relatively simple service, try to implement low-code or even no-code solutions. You’ll still need a developing team, but it can be much smaller than expected.
This decision also suits you if you want faster time to market since the same team of developers solves more work tasks at the same time. Some of the most common low-code platforms are:
- Blup
- Visual LANSA
- Zoho Creator
- Creatio
- UI Bakery
Those tools minimize human factors and increase traceability, making tracking changes and demonstrating compliance easier. These services already have dozens of integrations with common software solutions, from CRMs to various AI-based tools.
While choosing a low-code tool, ensure it supports the latest data security measures. Check whether it is GDPR and CCPA compliant. It would be perfect if your tool complies with industry-specific requirements like HIPAA, SOX, or PCI DSS.
Beware that this solution fits only relatively simple software projects. If you want a complex service with myriad integrations, you need a custom development team.
Try BaaS Solutions
BaaS (Backend as a Service) solutions are cloud-based platforms that provide developers with pre-built backend infrastructure and services, such as databases, APIs, and server management. These solutions free up resources (including time) so you, as a business, can focus on their core product or service while leveraging the expertise and scalability of the BaaS provider. One of some well-known BaaS providers are:
- AWS Amplify
- Supabase
- Appwrite
- Nhost
- Parse
BaaS fits those companies that constantly release new, relatively complex, standardized tools. They increase your speed to market, as you can easily scale up without thinking, “How can I physically maintain those new servers and capacities?”
Consider Outsourcing
Since we’ve talked about outsourcing server maintenance, it’s time to talk about outsourcing the project itself. It’s a common practice for application development since it can save you time on the bureaucracy of actual hiring.
We recommend you collaborate only with well-established teams. That’s how you can ensure you’ll get the best product within the deadlines. These teams often have multiple experts for each work area, so if something happens with one developer, they can easily onboard another expert to ensure you get a product on time. You can be sure you’ll get the best possible product since well-established teams have project managers responsible for product coherence.
Meanwhile, you can’t predict the outcome if you choose to collaborate with separate freelancers. They may have different development approaches, so you may spend more time mixing their incompatible parts than on their initial work.
We also recommend you choose a team with a similar cultural background. That way, you can be sure that you will work together well since you have many common points, similar work ethic, and taste.
Track Your Results
Monitor as much data as possible if you consider it unnecessary today. Algorithms constantly change, so what was irrelevant yesterday may become crucial tomorrow. So, it’s better to track each possible metric to have enough historical data to understand your current situation better.
It won’t affect product launches because, in most cases, it takes just a few hours to establish tracking tools. But it will benefit you in the long run. Use different monitoring tools and implement those data-driven insights into your workflow.
Share data with your stakeholders to demonstrate that you are a responsible business that constantly improves.
Accept That Not Everything Will Go According to Plan
It’s impossible to plan everything. Even if you have complete control over your team, you don’t know what may happen with the world in the next year. Just recall yourself from November 2019: You may have prepared some terrific plans for 2020, but March changed everything.
When it comes to less major events, you should be ready for the situation where you may face some unexpected challenges. That’s why most businesses now use agile methodology, where they can quickly adapt to those new challenges. It lowers the stress of stakeholders, upper management, and the team since everyone knows the team does its best in the current situation.
Corpsoft Solutions Experience
We, Corpsoft Solutions, are an established team with experts from East Europe and North America ready to make the software solution that fits all your business needs. We work with companies of any size, from small startups to corporations. Today, we want to share some recent examples of modern application development.
Meal planner with AI assistant
About a year ago, we were approached by a health-tech startup that wanted to create a meal planner and a whole ecosystem. They want to provide their clients an easy way to eat a healthy diet with a reasonable calorie intake and PFC (proteins, fat, carbs).
Once we analyzed the market, we understood that there was no app with a virtual assistant that could gather all scattered diet data in one service. There were countless websites with recipes, there were services where users could calculate daily PFC, and there were planning tools. But at the time of research, no app can do all of this and provide a user-friendly answer to the user.
So, we offered them the opportunity to develop an AI-based meal assistant to analyze users’ potential food restrictions, current food supply, and budget and create a healthy meal plan. Meanwhile, users don’t need to fill out dozens of tables, as they can simply write the info to our AI chatbot, and it converts their words to data. Later, the app uses this data for meal planning.
Niche NYC Marketplace
Each person, at least once in life, meets scammers in the common marketplace. So, ProperGuild founders wanted to create a safe and local marketplace of expert services for NYC residents and guests. And we’ve helped them with it.
They already have a small marketplace with a different name and interface. But, unfortunately, it didn’t work as well as was expected. So, they contacted us to modify this product idea. We’ve decided to change almost everything by changing the name, UI and adding the following:
- Service and Provider Search with filtering by location and category;
- Free built-in Q&A chat;
- Paid online consultations for services;
- Payment through Stripe integration and more.
Now, they are one of the most successful marketplaces in New York.
Final Words
Don’t be afraid of changes, as they drive the process. Embrace them and be among the first to implement them into your workflow, and you’ll see how rival clients switch to you! Use the tips above to ensure the fastest e-commerce time to market.
Try outsourcing different aspects of software development, from using BaaS to leveraging the help of the outsourcing teams. It will increase your business value and speed up all your development-related processes.
Are you ready to achieve faster time to market? Contact Corpsoft Solutions today to see the first results tomorrow!
Share this post:
