When building a product or service it is necessary to take the product to market as soon as possible. Living in a global business world means competing against a lot of vendors each with its unique offerings. From prototyping to building and finally deploying the product, having a cost and time-saving mechanism can ensure you reach your customer before anyone else. While taking the product to the market at the earliest is exciting, it is already challenging at the same time. You have to adopt technologies and frameworks that allow quick set up of products and deliver value to your customers.
In this post, we will look at five ways to build and deliver products quickly and reliably.
Sketch It on Paper
I cannot stress it enough. Whatever you have on your mind, put it on paper. No matter how big or small the product is, whether it’s a new idea or just enhancement, bringing your thoughts on paper clears the confusion which lengthy meetings cannot conclude. If you have a Software product and you want to convey how it is going to look like, you can build a wireframe or UI. Having an early sketch can also bring light to issues that might not be obvious in the beginning.
Product Prototype
No matter what product you have, an early sketch of the idea is always necessary to attract potential customers. This is called prototyping. Prototyping can be of many types. It could be a Visual Prototype, Proof of Concept, or Early Demonstration.
Visual Prototype is best when you want to show the world the product you intend to design. Suppose you want to bring a new car model to the market. By just specifying the features or pictures may not fascinate the user. A better way to attract the gossip and maintain interest is to show your buyers how the final model will be looking. To build early models, 3D models can be helpful. If you are building a new cell phone, build an early dummy of the phone using 3D modeling and printing so that the users will know how the final product look will. Your prototype may not be working but this can be neglected if the functioning is not necessary at the moment.
Proof of Concept is another way to know that your idea will work, and your hard work won’t hit a dead end. In software products, Proof of Concept can be a very effective way to demonstrate how the final use case will look. But this does not limit the applications of POC. POC is ideal for other products as well such as toys, games, appliances, and so on. Use whatever you have available, build the product, and demonstrate how the final product will be looking. In software applications, POC can help identify potential loopholes, shortcomings, or even bottlenecks that can appear later on.
Final comes Early Demonstration. This works by compromising on the features which do not add any unique value, rather taking the product to the market with features that are your unique selling point. For instance, suppose you are building a car or even a Netflix type of website. Building and focusing on every minor aspect, such as headlights in the case of cars or user registration in Netflix, will not bring more users to your products. These mundane items can be built later or even neglected for a short period until your product vision is ready and hits the market.
Containerize Your Application
This is only related to Software Products. When you have an exciting idea of a Software product, containerization is the modern way of building and deploying your vision. Docker allows containerization of applications so that they can get up and running in no time. Docker repository contains all the images you need to set up your application. Follow the steps mentioned in the JFrog guide. Software products tend to get frustrating as the development goes on. But having effective infrastructure adds to the further complexity. Docker can be your savior here. Docker is that technological answer to solves infrastructure and deployment issues by providing a single platform across all the platforms. This means that whether your developer is using macOS or Windows, or even Linux, coding the product can be abstracted. Further deployment of the product becomes seamless since the Docker images are consistent across all the Cloud providers.
Outsource and Delegate
Another helpful way to deliver value to your users early is to delegate whatever you can. For instance, in the case of cars, you don’t need to worry about bumper if that is not your selling point. In the case of software products, rather than building and reinventing the wheel, acquire off-the-shelf components such as third-party libraries, custom code, so that you keep building and testing the product is reduced and more focus is given to how you build your vision.
