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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For this, applications are developed on cloud infrastructure using modern tools and techniques. Using cloud-native technologies benefits businesses as they enable quick and frequent changes to applications without affecting service delivery, this helps businesses break barriers to innovation and improve their competitive advantage.

For cloud-native applications to be effective and deliver on their promise, it is important to plan the right cloud architecture and document the cloud engineering strategy so the apps can be scalable, flexible, and resilient.

Why Enterprises are Building Cloud Native Applications?

The availability of digital technologies such as cloud, AI/ML, and IoT are transforming the way businesses operate today. Increased access to data is seeing a corresponding increase in the need for storage and computing power. Traditional, on-prem systems cannot cope with this pace of change and the investment can be formidable.

By modernizing their application and migrating to the cloud, businesses can reap many benefits. But, modernizing goes beyond mere migration of apps. Some or most apps must be made cloud-native to provide the intended benefits, which include:

• Improved Efficiency: Cloud-native applications are developed using the agile approach including DevOps and continuous delivery. Scalable applications are being built using cloud services, automated tools, and modern design culture.
• Lower Cost: The cost of infrastructure is drastically reduced when businesses opt for the cloud-native approach as they share resources and pay only peruse.
• High Availability: Building robust and highly accessible applications is made possible by cloud-native technology. In order to give customers a great experience, feature updates don’t result in app downtime, and businesses can scale up app resources during busy times of year.
• Flexibility, Scalability, and Resilience: The traditional apps are called monolithic because they are a single block structure composed of all the required functionalities. Any upgradation can be disruptive and needs changes to be made across the block, making them more rigid and hard to scale. Cloud-native applications, on the other hand, are made up of several small, interdependent functionalities called microservices. As a result, changes can be made to the different units without affecting the rest of the software, making them more resilient, flexible, and scalable.
• Easier Management: Cloud Native architecture and development are containerized and utilize cloud services by default. It is often called serverless and tends to reduce infrastructure management.

Cloud Native Architecture: Designed for Scale

Cloud-native architecture is designed such that it is easy to maintain, cost-effective, and self-healing. It does not depend on physical servers, hence called serverless technology, and provides greater flexibility.

APIs are needed for the cloud-native microservices to communicate with each other using an event-driven architecture for enhanced performance of every application. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is an open-source platform that facilitates cloud-native development with support for projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy.

The cloud-native architecture typically consists of:

• Immutable Infrastructure: The servers hosting cloud-native applications do not change even after the deployment of an application. In case additional computing resources are needed, the app is migrated to a new, high-performance server, and does not require a manual upgrade.
• Loosely-Coupled Microservices: The different functionalities available as microservices are loosely coupled – that is, they are not integrated as in a monolith, and remain independent of each other, only communicating when needed. This allows changes to be made to individual applications without affecting the overall performance of the software.
• Application Programming Interface (API): Microservices communicate with each other using APIs and state what data a microservice requires to deliver a particular result.
• Service Mesh: The communication between the different microservices is managed by a software layer called the service mesh in the cloud infrastructure. This can also be used for adding more functions without the need to write new code.
• Containerized Microservices: The microservice code and other required files, such as  resource files, libraries, and scripts, are packed in containers, which are the smallest compute unit in the cloud-native application. As a result, cloud-native applications can run independently of the underlying operating system and hardware, allowing them to be run from on-premise infrastructure or on the cloud, including hybrid clouds.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Small, frequent changes are made to the software to improve its efficiency and identify and troubleshoot errors quickly. This improves the quality of the code on an ongoing basis. CD makes the microservices always ready to be deployed to the cloud as and when needed. Together, the two make software delivery efficient.

Overcoming Cloud-Native Development Challenges

Despite the many advantages and ease of development and maintenance of cloud-native applications, it is not without challenges. As the business expands, so can the number of microservices, requiring more oversight and maintenance. It requires strong integrators, APIs, and the right tools for improved management of asynchronous operations. Ensuring that each integrates well with the overall system and performs as expected is critical. Further, regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) make security and governance critical for compliance.

These challenges make comprehensive testing and quality assurance essential. Therefore, a good cloud-native app development approach should include:

• Assessing the needs: A good understanding of the required functionality is essential to start from scratch or modernize existing apps. Building cloud-native apps from the ground up may be more beneficial even for businesses that are modernizing so that they can leverage the advantages better.
• Designing the architecture: Right from the cloud model to use to whether to build from scratch or repurpose are some of the many decisions that need to be taken at this stage. This will influence the nature of the technical stack the business should opt for.
• Security and Governance: While the cloud service provider may have their own security protocols for the servers, each organization must have its own governance policy and implement security to protect data and ensure compliance.
• Testing and QA: Testing each microservice individually and as a composite unit is critical to ensure performance and customer satisfaction.

FAQs

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Such apps that offer multiple mini services under one platform are called SuperApps. Gartner equates SuperApps to a Swiss army knife, the demand for which is being driven by youth who require powerful and easy-to-use mobile-first experiences. It also expects 50% of the global population to opt for SuperApps by 2027. Quick to tap into this trend are ‘forward-thinking organizations’ that create composable application and architecture strategies to capitalize on new business opportunities in relevant and related markets.

Key features of the SuperApp are:

• They offer core features and enhance personalization by delivering a variety of mini apps such as messaging and payments.
• They consolidate services, features, and functions from a variety of mobile apps into a single app to enable customers to use it for multiple operations.
• They improve customer experience and ease of use with features like single sign-on (SSO), data sharing, app usage tracking, and preference-based push notifications.
• They are poised to support other services like Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, chatbots, and metaverse for an immersive experience.
• They help in achieving economies of scale, improving user experience, leveraging a large user base, and engaging different mini app teams effectively.

Super App Development – Best Practices

While consolidating multiple apps on a single app platform provides several benefits to the users, the development of such an app brings with it, its own challenges. Therefore, the right strategy, resources, and implementation become key.

The 5 Best Practices for the development of super apps include

Best Practice #1 Focus on Core Offering

Yandex started as a taxi app and then expanded. Identify the core service offering, ensure the supply side economy to build customer loyalty and trust, and constantly improve customer experience with that service through feedback and enhanced customer service. Create a list of key features and prioritize them based on customer requirements. Identify features that can differentiate your app from the rest in this space. In addition to the features relevant to the core features, include some must-haves like integration with Google and social, payment systems, and multi-language support, especially if the user base will go beyond boundaries.

Best Practice #2 Expand and Simplify

Once you have a substantial user base, expand your service offerings. Your users should be able to perform activities easily and have a seamless experience between the different features available. For instance, users should be able to leverage promotions, make payments, or cancel without exiting the app.

Best Practice #3 Collaborate to Grow

A single company cannot build for providing comprehensive services around the core offering. Therefore, forge partnerships with other suppliers to provide a unified experience and add value. Ensure the apps are credible and robust so that there is no compromise in user experience.

Best Practice #4 Select the Right Platform

The choice of platform will depend on the target audience. If the product is a niche, to be used by an identifiable, limited set of people, a single platform may be effective. But where the reach is wider with a variety of apps, you could choose between a single platform, multiple platforms, or a mobile-optimized website. Factors such as the availability of resources and budget will influence these decisions.

Best Practice #5 Elucidate Your Digital Business Model

How you plan to monetize your SuperApp is important to make the app sustainable and profitable. Since there are many mini apps, some from other vendors, having a clear strategy becomes critical. The app could provide some services free of charge to win customer trust and monetize the core functions. Another option could be to provide limited features for free and added functionalities for those who pay. The subscription model is the third option, and advertising revenues is the fourth option.

Best Practice #6 Build a Top-Notch Tech Stack

Robust tech stack along with a skilled development team is essential for building a feature-rich app and integrating multiple mini apps for a seamless performance. This spans the entire spectrum from the right cloud service such as Google Cloud, Azure, or AWS; technology suites such as HTML5 and CSS; programming and testing languages such as Python, Java, C#, Python; developer tools such as Redux, ReactJs, Ruby on Rails; testing frameworks such as Selenium; to other tools for marketing, management, analytics, and payment gateways. Security is another key aspect as data and finance are involved and any compromise can lead to erosion of customer trust, noncompliance, and loss of reputation.

Partner with Indium for Building a Killer SuperApp

Managing the development, testing, security, and integration aspects of SuperApps requires multiple skills. Building the tech stack and designing the architecture for scalability, flexibility, and robustness are critical.

Indium Software is a technology solution provider with cross-domain expertise and vast experience in developing cutting-edge solutions using best-of-breed technologies. We work closely with our customers to understand their core focus and design, develop, test, and deploy solutions that empower users to be more effective in meeting their goals.

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