As we are near the end of 2023, pursuing optimal tech solutions remains as crucial as ever. For startups navigating this dynamic environment, the choice of programming language can significantly impact operations, particularly in application engineering, product engineering, and low code. In this context, the debate between Go and Rust takes center stage, offering distinct advantages for those willing to explore beyond the mainstream options.

Golang and Rust hold a unique distinction in programming languages, having emerged in the early 2000s and 2010s. This sets them apart in a landscape dominated by languages with roots stretching back centuries.

When thoroughly examining Golang versus Rust, it becomes evident that these two languages share notable similarities. However, a closer inspection of six important categories revealed that
This head-to-head comparison delves into the languages’ attributes, including:

•  Performance
•  Features
•  Ease of Development
•  Maintenance
•  Popularity
•  Community

This article aims to shed light on the distinctions between each language, providing valuable insights to guide your decision-making process for your tech stack. Continue reading to discover the key differentiators!

Golang vs. Rust: Side-by-Side Comparison

Explore this direct comparison between Golang and Rust. This detailed analysis ensures that you can make an informed decision based on the specific features and capabilities that matter most to you in your chosen programming language.

Performance:

Go and Rust both put a strong emphasis on performance. Being relatively new languages, they are designed to perform well and surpass their predecessors.

While both languages excel in terms of speed and efficiency when compared to other programming languages, the crucial question is: how do they measure up against each other? Through rigorous benchmark testing, it becomes evident that Go and Rust each have their areas of strength, with neither consistently outperforming the other.

TLDR: Regarding speed and performance, both Go and Rust demonstrate commendable capabilities, each with its areas of proficiency.

Features:

While Go brings notable strengths to the table with its efficient binaries and reliable package management, Rust offers an extensive set of equally impressive features. These encompass zero-cost abstraction, obvious error messages, move semantics, robust data race prevention, and comprehensive pattern-matching capabilities.

TLDR: Both Go and Rust offer robust capabilities, each catering to specific programming needs without significantly overshadowing the other.

Ease & Speed of Development:

Go’s emphasis on readability and simplicity renders it a highly accessible language, making the learning curve relatively smooth. In contrast, Rust introduces intricate concepts like borrowing and ownership, which can pose a steeper learning curve for developers. Rust openly acknowledges its learning curve.

TLDR: Go offers a more straightforward learning experience, and Rust’s advanced concepts contribute to a steeper learning curve. The choice ultimately depends on your comfort with these concepts. It’s not a clear-cut win for either language in this category.

Maintenance:

Maintenance encompasses the tasks required to ensure your programs’ smooth operation and longevity. In this regard, Go holds an advantage, as its codebase is inherently simpler, making maintenance tasks more straightforward. With its added complexity, Rust may entail a more intricate maintenance process.
TLDR: Go’s simplicity lends itself to easier maintenance than Rust, which involves more intricate upkeep due to its inherent complexity. In this category, Go holds an advantage.

Community:

The open-source languages community is a thriving community of developers that is instrumental in aiding newcomers in mastering the language’s nuances and best practices. Evaluating the strength of a community, however, is subjective. If we see both Rust and Go communities, both communities often garner significant praise, underscoring their vibrancy and support. This recognition indicates a solid and active community.

TLDR: Rust and Go benefit from thriving communities, but Rust’s community visibility stands out in this comparison. It’s important to note that both communities are strong in their own right. This category is more evenly matched.

Popularity:

Defining the popularity of relatively young languages like Go and Rust can be challenging. Despite their impressive features and advantages, they have yet to reach the widespread adoption of more established languages like JavaScript, Python, or Java.

According to Stack Overflow, less than 10% of developers currently utilize Rust or Go. However, it’s worth noting that Go holds the 14th position in the rankings for top languages, while Rust trails behind in the 26th spot, as per the TIOBE Index for January 2022. This index considers various factors, including search engine popularity, presence in computer science courses, and endorsements from skilled engineers.

TLDR: In comparing Golang and Rust, Go enjoys more popularity than Rust.

Now that we’ve explored the side-by-side comparison of Golang and Rust, let’s explore deeper into each language individually.

What Is Golang?

Golang, also known as “Go,” is a computer language that is statically typed and compiled. It is positioned as a competitor in contemporary programming languages and was created by Google developers, drawing inspiration from C and C++. Because of its simple syntax, some people often compare Golang to Python.

Go’s statically typing imposes stringent guidelines on variable declarations. This feature makes error detection more reliable, especially regarding syntactic instances. This accuracy helps to make coding more dependable and secure.

Compilers play a fundamental role in enforcing static type-checking. They convert code into machine-executable instructions, a process that occurs before execution. Consequently, compiled languages exhibit higher overall speed than their interpreted counterparts. In addition to speed, compiled languages afford more excellent command over hardware elements. This and Go’s intentional design highlight its strengths in memory management and multithreading capabilities.

An integral aspect of Go’s memory management is its garbage collection feature. This mechanism ensures efficient memory allocation by utilizing managed heaps. It’s worth noting that Go addresses a concern seen in C regarding memory safety, marking an improvement. Including a garbage collector adds a layer of security and stability to Go’s memory handling.

In essence, this signifies that in Go, memory no longer used is repurposed for new objects, while unused things are efficiently cleared from memory. Programs with garbage collection tend to exhibit superior performance as they are not prone to memory leaks.

Another standout feature in Go is the concept of goroutines. These allow for creating functions or methods concurrently alongside other processes or procedures. This concurrency emphasis underlines Go’s multithreading prowess, enabling a central processing unit (CPU) to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. This capability translates to heightened speed and overall efficiency in Go programs.

Advantages of Golang

When weighing the pros and cons of Golang vs. Rust, understanding the strengths of Go is essential. Here are some distinct advantages that position Go as a favourable choice for your next project:

Comprehensive:

Go impresses with its all-encompassing ecosystem, from robust tools to extensive libraries and well-documented resources. Its toolset boasts minimalistic dependencies, simplifying development workflows. A notable mention goes to GoDoc, a package facilitating real-time documentation generation while you code.

Fast:
Go’s notable performance is attributed to many factors, including efficient garbage collection, swift compilation, and robust concurrency support. This speed, often considered one of Go’s hallmark features, is substantiated through benchmarks, showcasing Go outperforming Python by up to 100 times in certain areas. It consistently rivals or surpasses Java in terms of speed.

Portable:
Go’s versatility shines through its seamless compilation across multiple platforms. Compatibility issues have become a thing of the past, allowing developers to work on their preferred operating system without hindrance.

Readable:
While Go inherits runtime efficiency like C, its readability draws inspiration from Python. The syntax is highly approachable for programmers, especially those proficient in English. Essential formatting elements like indentation and spacing are automated by tools like gofmt, supplemented by golint for additional style checks. This user-friendly design makes Go particularly appealing to newcomers.

Recommended Use Cases for Golang

Golang finds its application across a diverse range of project types. According to the 2019 survey results, web development, databases, and network programming emerge as the primary domains where Go shines. The language’s inherent proficiency in concurrency positions it as an excellent choice for networking services.

Go is highly esteemed as a top-tier language for backend web development. Swift execution on a webpage plays a pivotal role in establishing brand presence and user engagement online, underscoring its significance.

Furthermore, Go boasts official support for the Google Cloud Platform, aligning perfectly with the cloud computing paradigm integral to various services within the platform. This makes Go a stellar choice for high-performance cloud applications.

Companies Utilizing Golang

While the choice between Golang and Rust shouldn’t solely hinge on popularity, understanding why major corporations opt for Go provides valuable insights into the language’s potential.

Google:
As the birthplace of Go, Google’s unwavering support underscores the language’s stability. Many of Google’s internal projects, including flagship products like Google Chrome, Google Earth, and YouTube, are built using Go. This endorsement from one of the tech giants speaks volumes about Go’s robustness.

Twitch:
Twitch, a leading live streaming platform for gamers, handles massive amounts of real-time chats and video streams concurrently. By implementing Go, Twitch enhanced its garbage collection process, resulting in a smoother and more responsive user experience.

SoundCloud:
SoundCloud, a renowned music streaming service, has become a launchpad for emerging artists. The platform employs both Golang and Ruby on Rails in its tech stack. Go’s static analysis capabilities, allowing for code debugging before execution, played a pivotal role in SoundCloud’s choice of Go.
The fact that these major players in the business have embraced Go demonstrates its versatility and efficiency in a range of contexts, enhancing its appeal as a feasible option for high-volume, high-performance applications.

What Is Rust?

Rust is a statically typed, compiled programming language supporting various programming paradigms. Its design places a premium on safety and performance, particularly emphasizing secure concurrency.

In terms of syntax, Rust aligns closely with C++. Unlike languages like Go or C++, Rust does not employ garbage collection. Instead, it uses a borrow checker to verify memory safety. The borrow checker enforces rules regarding data ownership and prevents data races – situations where two or more pointers attempt to access the exact memory location simultaneously.

Rust is tailored for what’s known as “programming in the large.” This entails coding for large teams or small groups over an extended duration. Rust is engineered to accommodate and promote highly concurrent and exceptionally secure systems to facilitate this approach.

The inception of Rust dates back to 2006 when Mozilla employees-initiated experiments that would eventually lead to the development of the language. Approximately three years later, a stable release of Rust emerged, and it is now integral to critical components of the Firefox browser.

Since 2016, and in each subsequent year, Rust has earned the distinction of being voted the “most loved programming language” in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey. This accolade attests to its popularity and the positive sentiment it garners within the developer community.

Advantages of Rust

In a fair assessment of languages, including the comparison of Golang vs. Rust, it’s essential to provide an impartial evaluation of each language. With a brief overview of Rust in mind, here are its key advantages:

Performant:

Rust’s compilers use inherently leads to impressive speed, surpassing many interpreted languages like Python. Even when compared to languages like Java, known for its JIT compiler optimized for performance, Rust still maintains a speed advantage.

Intentional:

Rust exhibits characteristics that underscore a deliberate effort by its designers to create a disciplined language that enhances the developer experience. Notably, Rust pledges zero-cost abstractions. These abstractions, which involve translating high-level code to low-level language or machine code for execution, typically incur a performance penalty. However, in Rust, there is no discernible difference in speed between low-level code and abstracted programs. This means abstractions come without a performance cost.

Safe:

One of Rust’s standout features is its stringent compiler, which meticulously scrutinizes each variable to ensure memory safety. Type safety is a cornerstone of Rust, ensuring that programs run without the occurrence of segfaults (illegal memory access errors). Rust’s ownership system analyses memory at compile-time, effectively preventing these issues.

Concurrent:

Concurrency is a well-known strength of Rust, akin to Go. What sets Rust apart is its borrower checker, which distinguishes it from other languages. Rust’s unique approach to concurrency ensures multithreading without the risk of undefined behavior.

These advantages collectively position Rust as a language that excels in performance, intentional design, safety, and concurrency, making it a compelling choice for various projects.

Recommended Use Cases for Rust

Rust’s versatility allows for its application in a wide array of scenarios. However, there are specific domains where Rust truly excels:

Systems Programming:

Rust shines in systems programming, a field that requires high performance and precise control over hardware resources. Systems programmers, who closely interface with the hardware, benefit from Rust’s impeccable performance and zero-cost abstractions. Given Rust’s heritage with C++, it’s well-equipped for middle-level capabilities, balancing low-level and high-level languages.

Middle-Level Capabilities:

Rust’s middle-level capabilities make it an excellent choice for tasks requiring a nuanced approach to memory management and hardware interaction. Middle-level languages serve as a strategic compromise between low-level languages (which offer detailed control over hardware) and high-level languages (which provide abstraction for ease of development). This makes Rust an ideal candidate for projects involving operating systems and complex computer applications. Despite its proximity to low-level operations, Rust remains human-readable, a quality seldom found in machine code.

Companies Using Rust

While Go enjoys support from major corporations, it’s essential to acknowledge the impressive roster of companies that have embraced Rust. Here are some notable examples:

Firefox:

Rust’s integration with Firefox, known as ‘oxidation,’ underscores its significance in the browser’s development. This collaboration is so substantial that it has a dedicated wiki page detailing the project. Firefox’s efficient handling of multiple tabs owes much to Rust’s involvement.

Yelp:

Yelp, a prominent platform for business recommendations and reviews, leverages Rust for critical operations. The company’s developers have created their Rust framework for A/B testing, a pivotal tool for optimizing page performance. This framework is deployed across all Yelp applications and websites. Yelp’s choice of Rust stems from its impressive speed, on par with C, and enhanced safety.

Dropbox:

Dropbox, a leading cloud service provider, relies on Rust for its core file storage system. This strategic implementation of Rust has significantly enhanced the efficiency and performance of Dropbox’s services.

Wrapping Up

Go and Rust, despite their youth, share significant commonalities. Both intentionally designed languages prioritize memory safety and concurrency, demonstrating superior performance to their peers.

However, the distinctions between these languages are pronounced. Go is characterized by its simplicity, while Rust embraces complexity. Their respective features and priorities diverge in meaningful ways.

In the Golang vs. Rust comparison, we arrive at a draw. This means the choice between the two ultimately depends on your business needs and preferences. Both languages offer unique strengths and advantages, and the decision should be based on carefully considering your project’s requirements.

As we conclude this comparison, stay tuned for our upcoming whitepaper on Go Lang. Discover how harnessing the power of Golang can drive your business forward. Watch this space for insights that can reshape your development strategy.

The post Go vs. Rust in 2023: Choosing the Right Language for Your Tech Venture appeared first on Indium.

Image Source:   www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/product-engineering-services-market

With strong application engineering, you can create a roadmap that directs the team and helps prioritize the activities in order to shorten time-to-market, reduce costs, improve user experiences, and create high-quality apps that outlast their rivals. To dominate the industry market, investing in a strong product engineering staff is strongly advised. Two of the crucial elements that Product Engineering supports are the industry’s rising requirement for constant innovation and revisions as well as keeping up with the most recent trends.

This article explores the significance of application engineering, how it shapes the product industry through technologies, and the role of platform engineering in new application development.

Key Trends to Watch

With technological advancements soaring, keeping an eye on certain trends, designing new applications, and launching them on the market is crucial. Also, it is important for application engineers to stay updated with the latest developments in technology and other aspects of the industry that help them deliver high-quality, error-free, and cost-effective applications.

Environmental Aspects

• With users becoming proactive about climate awareness and changes, it is advisable to design applications that align with environmental factors and are sustainable and renewable.
• The application engineering team should focus on the methodology, the production process, and other environmentally friendly methods, as it is estimated that up to 4/5ths of a product’s lifetime emissions are determined at the design stage.

Advancements in AI

• The application engineering team’s responsibilities and roles have been reduced multifold with the introduction of AI and other recent advancements.
• From design to testing to launching, the involvement of AI has been tremendously supportive and sufficient to enhance the application development process and reduce manual errors.
• A PwC study estimates that by 2030, product upgrades will account for 45% of all economic gains, demonstrating how quickly applications can be launched and how this supports economic growth.

VR and AR Innovations

• The application engineering team can leverage virtual and augmented reality to help users experience interactive and immersive ways of understanding the application and its use case.
• AR and VR also help produce higher-quality applications at a potentially cheaper cost. Around 53% of organizations utilize VR or AR technology for product engineering.

The Impact of Product Engineering on Business

The significance of application engineering extends beyond the company to its shareholders and employees. Here are some key areas where the product engineering team plays a pivotal role:

Competitive Advantage

Introducing newly developed applications into the market ahead of peers involves immense dedication and commitment to innovation, as new applications launch every minute. A competitive differentiation strategy can be established among consumers by initiating the application launch earlier.

This approach helps set the price, features, brand image, and higher quality standards more effectively. Accelerating time-to-market (TTM) enables the company to profitably capture the revenue market and enhance application features based on user preferences.

Low Production Costs

Launching the developed applications on time helps streamline the workflow in the design stage and reduces the cost of production, but not the quality of the applications. With an estimated launch schedule, coordination and efficiency among various departments increase.

As a result, companies can make bulk purchases, identify economic opportunities, and adopt innovative equipment that operates efficiently with lower power consumption.

Customer Satisfaction

Escalating application launch helps to read consumer behavior and preferences within minutes. Consumers are fed regularly with applications at regular intervals, so they meet customers’ expectations to the best of their ability.

With an early launch, you can work on customer feedback and enhance your relationship with loyal customers. The role of application engineers is to help iterate the application quickly, deliver error-free applications, and enhance the customer experience.

Faster Revenue Generation

Shortening the timeframe of your first application launch sets the stage for it. As you begin the sale, demand increases among consumers, and the flow of revenue starts, allowing companies to capture a larger market share quickly.

You can also extend the lifecycle of the application until it finds a first copy or any competitor’s application. As an early entrant to the market, the demand will exponentially increase, thereby scaling operations and increasing income growth. Seize the market opportunity with an excellent application engineering team and boost your company’s ROI.

Strategies for Product Engineering to Accelerate Time-To-Market

Developing, streamlining, and optimizing certain aspects of your application engineering process can help you deliver the application software early and successfully.

Identify the following areas contributing to an early time-to-market (TTM) that have a larger impact and work on them to recoup your initial investments:

Refined Product Roadmap

Developing an application should start with crafting a roadmap with the vision, strategy, approach, milestones, resource allocation, development methodology, and marketing features.

You can analyze the next step through the roadmap and derive a clear idea and formula required to speed up your application launch.

Streamlined Methodology and Rapid Testing:

Inefficient approaches can be eliminated by iterating the workflow. Also, building a quick prototype of the model will help automate the testing procedure and collect consumer feedback, helping bring the application to market as soon as possible.

Cross-functional Coordination

From stakeholders to application managers to testing technicians, every individual’s cooperation is required to achieve time-to-market (TTM) for your application.

As stakeholders decide on the kind of application, the manager plans and builds the road map, and engineers and technicians work on the model, coordination among different departments is one of the determining factors in accelerating time-to-market (TTM).

Promote Your Product

Market your application creatively and innovatively to grab consumers’ attention, which helps in sales and demand. This approach will empower you to build and launch many applications, helping your company deliver more such applications.

Platform Engineering to Empower Developers for an Efficient TTM

Platform Engineering is an innovative concept that makes it easier for developers to do their jobs by creating the platform for the application.

The architecture and infrastructure that underpin computing resources, networking, and application storage are designed by platform engineers. Additionally, they offer a “Internal Developer Platform” that takes care of all the application’s operating requirements.

Building a dedicated platform to assist developers in the early delivery of the application is the major goal of platform engineering. By using the notion of product engineering, you may shorten the time it takes for your applications to market. Learn about the features and how they support an early product launch to assist your developers in developing and deploying apps more quickly.

Indium Software’s Commitment to Excellence and Time-to-Market

Indium Software focuses on developing high-quality applications that meet their customers’ expectations and adhere to quality engineering practices. Indium Software’s commitment to quality ensures that they capture and surpass customer attention, expectations, and experiences. They help organizations embrace a transformative customer approach with a comprehensive range of quality engineering practices and services.

Conclusion

To understand the success of your application, measure the time-to-market (TTM) it takes to reach the consumer. Due to the frequent introduction of new applications to the market and their influence on consumers, reducing your application’ time-to-market (TTM) is essential.

The need to stay ahead of the competition and enhance the market scope and revenue largely depends on the speed and timing of the product launch. Being an early entrant with a quality application helps customers stay forever and increases the production team’s effectiveness by eliminating workflows that underperform.

Platform engineering enhances the developer experience and productivity by creating reusable tools and self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations. This helps to expedite time-to-market (TTM). Optimise the production system and streamline your personnel to ensure a successful early application launch for your business.

The post Accelerating Time-to-Market: Best Practices in Product Engineering Services appeared first on Indium.

Gartner defines the product development lifecycle as the end-to-end process of designing, developing, testing, and launching a new product or service. For the effective transformation and maintenance of any idea in a product development lifecycle, it’s critical to follow a systematic approach to prioritizing investments in product and customer experience. You also need to integrate insights and best practices to maximize product management efforts, to improve the effectiveness of the product and engineering relationship.

A well-thought-through product lifecycle management can lead to.

• Informed decision-making at every stage of the development process
• Increased ROI
• Improved profitability
• Development of an effective marketing strategy
• Building a roadmap to make the product appealing and improve customer loyalty

The End-to-End Product Development Lifecycle

As we saw earlier, while the entire product development lifecycle can be divided into a few logical steps, in reality, several considerations at each stage can make or break the process. Therefore, getting them right every time is critical. This is where product engineering can play a key role.

Product engineering is an essential component of the product development lifecycle. It involves creating the product’s technical specifications, which serve as the foundation for the product’s design, development, and testing phases. Without proper product engineering, a product may not meet the requirements of the market or fail to meet the business’s goals.

Let’s look at the steps involved in product engineering.

Step 1. Ideation and Roadmap: Idea generation may or may not be the first step. What we mean is, there may be no great ideas for a product and its features or too many ideas that make focusing and planning the whole process a challenge. In either case, it is best to.

• go back to the customer problem the product aims to solve
• list out features based on recommendations
• assess them based on the value they create
• evaluate the time needed to develop those features
• understand the complexity involved, and
• shortlist features that are a must-have and can be developed quickly.

One of the advantages of agile development is that the first release does not have to contain all the features. It can be upgraded progressively and fine-tuned with feedback from the market. Therefore, we suggest that the ideas be parked for now, and developing a vision and a roadmap take precedence. Ideas can be part of the roadmap, to be released in later versions.

Step 2. Design and Specifications: Once there is clarity on the product concept, the next step is to flesh it out and add details. You need to understand the effort each feature will require and how it will interact with the rest of the product. You can use product design tools to generate 2D/3D models that can simulate, validate and analyze the product, and get user feedback. This stage ensures that the final product will conform to the desired specifications and requirements.

Step 3. Product Launch and Market Development: Once the design has been finalized and revised based on feedback, the developers can get into action, with a product manager monitoring the entire process to ensure quality, conformance, and timely delivery. Parallelly, you can also create marketing strategies and put them into practice to create a ripple in the market.

You need to arrive at the right pricing. It should neither be formidably high nor make the product look cheap. To be profitable, it must cover the cost of resources, effort, and marketing expenses.

Testing can also happen parallelly in the DevOps approach. Live users may also be used to test the product closer to release. The internal and external stakeholders can come together to ensure the product performs as promised, delivers value, solves the pain point for which it was created, and is compliant with applicable regulatory requirements.

Step 4. Review and Improvements: Based on the reaction of the users and the roadmap decided on earlier, new features can get added to the product. With each addition, it needs to be tested to ensure that the new features integrate seamlessly with the existing ones.

Feedback, analytics, and user data can help the development team make informed decisions on what needs strengthening, which features need improvement, and what is not working at all.

Indium Software worked with a US-based FinTech firm that specializes in cutting-edge payday lending solutions. It serves 0.5 million consumers, handling 7 million transactions plus. But the loan workflow processes were ineffective, slow, and costly. There were a lot of manual processes that made the system inefficient and resource intensive. Indium developed a responsive user interface after analyzing the current process, interacting with the users to understand their roles and requirements, assessing consumer behavior, and evaluating the regulatory requirements to improve workflow efficiency.  

A scalable and adaptable architecture was put in place automating nearly 70% of the receipt process. This resulted in improving the robustness of the origination process and responsiveness to loan applicants.

Post-Product Release Best Practices

Time-to-market plays a critical role in deciding the success of the product, along with the presence of innovative features and value additions. Another factor to keep in mind is that over time, other similar and better products may enter the market, making your product irrelevant. So, you must constantly evaluate the product and compare it with its peers, or even other products that may not be directly competing with it. This will help assess what kind of features need to be added and help understand how your product can remain relevant to its customers.

At times, it may also require the product development team to start afresh and bring a completely new product into the market. For instance, when cloud computing and cloud migration became widely prevalent, it compelled businesses to reconsider their product development strategy and focus on developing more cloud-native solutions.

Product engineering goes beyond product design and development. Compliance, governance, and security are also important aspects. The right technology stack and architecture can have a tremendous impact on product performance along with making the pricing competitive.

Indium Software has a team of cross-domain experts working closely with the technology team to design, develop, and test products. We work with businesses of all sizes, developing cost-effective, innovative, and high-performance products.

FAQs

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Product features refer to the various functionalities that deliver value to the customer and include capabilities, performance, components, and even the user interface (UI) design. Broadly, features can be described as tasks or actions that empower users to achieve certain objectives, solves a user challenge, and add value to the user while aligning with a theme or an effort of work.

Every function is a sum total of several steps and each step can be further broken down into sub steps. This translates to multiple features a product must have to capture all those operations and automate the function to provide value. Now, the challenge product developers face is in deciding which features to include in the product.

A product roadmap helps to create a balance between needs and speed and is arrived at after defining, analyzing, and prioritizing features. The process of arriving at the must-have features must be repeatable and standardized. Most importantly, it should be tied to a business objective to ensure that the product is not only feature-rich but also delivers value.

Feature vs Value

A product feature offers a functionality that benefits the users in some way. These benefits can vary in criticality, ranging from disrupting the way a process is done to enhancing the process efficiency or a nice-to-have feature with no serious impact. This impact on operations will also determine how effectively the feature will be used or whether it will be destined to be buried amongst the hundreds of other similar nice-to-have but not critical features. This will make the product seem less serious and lose a competitive advantage.

Since there can be many demands for different kinds of features and the limitations on cost, time, and resources prevent all the features to be delivered at the same time, prioritization becomes essential. This requires defining the feature, identifying its value to the user, estimating the time needed to develop and deploy, and plan further enhancements.

Even for businesses that focus on a single product or single function, this can be difficult. For businesses that try to provide end-to-end solutions or multiple products, this can be even more difficult. Also, different customers at different maturity levels will need different features, further complicating the decision-making process.

Measuring Value with Metrics – Best Practices

How to decide which features are critical and which are not? To evaluate the features, their usefulness should be measured in quantifiable ways as otherwise, the product may become bulky and unwieldy or not serve its intended purpose.

It may be of interest to read our Application Performance Engineering Success Story: Leveraging Elasticsearch for A Global Supply Chain Company.

Some of the Best Practices for mapping your features to measurable business outcomes include:

Make Feature Development Goal-Centric

Have a ‘goal-first’ approach to product development where the strategic initiatives are derived and a roadmap and requirements aligned with it. Communicating the direction of product development to all stakeholders will ensure greater cohesiveness and better collaboration.

Understand Customer Needs to Define Features

To be able to identify features and define them, it is important to understand the users, their pain points, and how your product can help them solve them. Creating buyer personas and mapping the features to the personas will help arrive at the feature list. User story mapping is a visualization of the customer journey that can also help to map the features to the personas.

Prioritize Features Based on Benefits

Identify the value the different features offer and establish metrics on how they can benefit the business. Based on the scores, rank them and calculate the RoI in terms of time, cost, and resources to arrive at the list of features that make it to the roadmap.

There is no single formula to calculate the value but here is a guideline to some criteria for assessing the value:

• Functional Value: It addresses a pain point
• Monetary Value: How much is it worth to the customer
• Social Value: The impact of the product on being able to connect to others
• Psychological Value: How it reinforces their identity

These benefits can be further divided into two categories: tangible and intangible. Tangible would include factors such as convenience, reliability, and cost. Intangible is more subtle and includes emotions, causes, and status. Together they will determine the USP of the product, increasing its desirability for the customers.

Data and analytics are critical for the feature development process to provide insights into user requirements and immediate needs, and help to arrive at the value of each feature. Therefore, having access to meaningful and relevant data is critical to the product engineering process.

Indium – For Measurable Business Outcomes

Indium Software is a cutting-edge technology solution provider with vast experience in product engineering and data engineering. Our team of technical experts with cross-domain experience work closely with product development companies as their extended arm, providing bespoke solutions best suited to their product and business objectives.

We provide end-to-end solutions to develop goal-first, feature-rich products that enhance the digital experience and break barriers of innovation. Our understanding of business domains enables us to contribute significantly in identifying and defining critical features, establishing the metrics to rank them based on value, and prioritize the development process for timely delivery in a resource-efficient manner.

FAQs

The post Product Engineering 101: Map Your Product Features and Capabilities with Measurable Business Outcomes appeared first on Indium.

Of course, the pandemic accelerated the need for digital adoption across sectors and this trend is here to stay. The key tailwinds for driving this growth include the need for building new digital infrastructure in addition to the development and re-engineering of products and services. There are several sectors that are ripe for disruption by adopting and embracing next-generation digital engineering including manufacturing, retail, BFSI and healthcare.

From a business perspective, leadership teams are looking to drive improvements across both customer experience and operational excellence.

Indium Software is a leading digital engineering solutions provider, with the experience and expertise needed to transform businesses and help them leverage next-gen technologies for their growth. Satish Pala, who took over as the Chief Technology Officer at Indium recently, is a digital transformation leader with over 2 decades of experience in the IT industry, he has extensive knowledge in data & analytics solutions across domains. He has delivered many cutting-edge analytics solutions for some of the top Fortune 500 companies. Satish is a passionate technologist with a keen interest in analytics, cloud and next-gen business intelligence..

In this conversation, Satish shares his views on key digital engineering trends and Indium’s digital engineering practice

Excerpts from the interview:

In your new role as CTO, what would be some of your key focus areas? How will this impact Indium’s strategy and approach?

My key focus areas include strategy, technology, innovation, and people. The main objective is for Indium to exceed the business goals through revised strategy, delivery process excellence and digital engineering capabilities. This changes Indium’s approach to growth in multiple ways. Some include strategic items like partnerships, new packaged solution offerings, capability development in next-gen technologies, establishing centers of excellence, dedicated labs, etc. On the people front, we’re planning a series of initiatives to continue to build and enhance our digital talent pool through certifications and training.

Are projects in emerging technologies like AI and blockchain still “projects” by specific teams or are we seeing enterprise-wide adoption?

We are definitely seeing a trend in enterprise-scale adoption of AI, not so much in blockchain. Here at Indium, our AI-based solutions focus on use cases across the board. One example is our AI-based accelerator teX.ai, which is being leveraged at a real estate enterprise for their core business operations on text extraction from the documents like agreements, thereby making it a highly efficient process. There are several other examples of how teX.ai is being used by companies in BFSI and retail segments.

Based on your experience, what are some of the common challenges businesses face when it comes to digital engineering?

A few common challenges companies have to tackle when it comes to digital engineering include:

• Identifying the right set of technologies and tools for the businesses to be efficient and agile.
• A culture shift in moving from a legacy paper or physical process to a digitized process. If the transition is not handled well, there will be chaos and businesses getting stuck in between.
• Training and education to mitigate this challenge.
• Policies & controls around privacy, data, intellectual property, and security.
• Accumulation of Digital Assets and lack of information governance.

How can digital engineering help businesses accelerate change while operationalizing their business value?

Deriving value in terms of direct business outcomes is a critical requirement of any digital effort. It must move the needle in terms of driving growth, improving competitive advantages for the company or streamlining operational processes.

• Digitization makes the business processes quick and efficient, thereby enabling businesses to make better use of available resources
• The right use of tools, technologies and innovations help drive competitiveness in the market and reduce time-to-market
• Proper use of digital engineering solutions will help enhance end-user experience and increase retention

How do you see digital engineering technologies evolving and how can businesses keep pace? Can you share some key emerging trends?

Digital Engineering technologies are evolving at a rapid pace due to the vast increase in innovations by the technology community. There is a variety of options to choose, whether a business is starting the digital journey or already a digital business. These technologies include building applications for user interactions, for back-office operations, data exchanges, API gateways, data and AI-based for decision making, or supporting technology services like DevOps and cloud.

Adoption of low code platform development has increased rapidly as well. In the manufacturing industry, factories are embracing Industry 4.0 with renewed focus. For example, building a digital twin makes the process smarter, optimizes performance across the manufacturing lifecycle, and drives product enhancements due to AI-based insights.

Please tell us about Indium’s partnerships with AWS, Striim, Mendix and Denodo and how Indium will deliver a service layer on top of each of these?

Indium has several partnerships with some of the top players in the digital engineering space. We partner with them and take the solutions to our clients either in consulting, implementation and/or maintenance. Some key partnerships include:

• AWS – We are a Select Tier Partner focusing on cloud migrations, application modernization, data analytics and devops

• Striim – We are a professional services partner helping in build real-time data streaming solutions between heterogeneous data platforms, thereby enabling businesses to obtain value from data quickly

• Mendix – We are one of the top Mendix services players in the world with vast experience in building low code platform-based solutions and also possess a large community of highly qualified low code developers

• Denodo – We are a services partner for Denodo, which is the top data virtualization player in the world

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