9 Steps to Developing Great Software Products

We don’t realize is that the development of your product is actually the 7th step in a 9-step product development process. If you get all of those planned correctly, the development step will be a breeze. You will have worked out all of the details in advance and you will know exactly what you will need to serve your customer and serve your business.

We all think our ideas are great. After all we thought of them! And the more we think about them and invest in them, the better they seem to us in our mind. The first step to a successful product is to Validate the problem you are solving. You need to go out and talk to as many potential customers as you can to make sure that your idea is as great to them as it is in your head. The key in the validation process is to not push your idea but to validate the need…it’s about asking them questions so you can understand and be able to articulate what problem your idea is solving.

Once you understand the problem you are solving well enough, you need to prototype a possible solution. A wireframe or prototype is a visual guide that represents the blueprint of a web application page or mobile app and shows what it does. A prototype contains the layout of the content, page elements and website navigation system and shows how they work together. Anyone can build a prototype and no coding skills are required! This is an essential step in the product development process. It will not only help you continue to validate your idea without writing a line of code but because prototypes are visual, they will help reduce communication errors and make your teams more effective once you start coding the solution.

After your prototype is ready, the next step is to show it to potential customers and confirm that the solution you came up with is clear and intuitive and to uncover potential usability issues. user testingOften, entrepreneurs skip this step but it is a very important one. It is a lot cheaper to make modifications on a prototype than re-writing code. For example, with the last startup I was consulting, our first two versions of the solution didn’t resonate with the users…we collected their feedback and we went back to the drawing board and got it right on the third try. Had we jumped into coding after creating the prototype, we would have to re-architect the entire site later.

Custom Code? 3rd Party Applications? Frameworks? Libraries? Plugins? Ruby? PHP? Java? Python? Relational Database? NoSQL? Native? Responsive? HTML5? Programming LanguagesThere are a lot of technology tools and solutions out there to help you bring your idea to life. The key is to pick the right solution for the problem you are trying to solve and the stage of the “validation” of idea/feature you are in. For example, if you are at the beginning of the “validation” stage, your goal should be to figure out what is the fastest way to build the solution so you can launch it and start to get real customers using your product. Step 5: Determine the Minimal Viable Product or Feature

With your development team, determine exactly what features in the prototype will be coded and how it will be implemented based on your time and cost constraints. All projects are performed and delivered under certain constraints: quality, time and cost -and you can’t have all three. For most startups, time and cost is of the essence, so when determining what and how to build focus on the following: What features do you have to build now vs. later For all the features that you pick, how can you simplify the backend and build it in stages Are there third party solutions or APIs that will help you cut the development time This step in the development process will help you deliver projects faster and within your budget and timeline

Once you pick your MVP, you then work with a designer to design your prototype. The design will breathe life into your the prototype.

Agile project management is a development philosophy and one that you should adopt for your business. It allows you to take smaller, more manageable steps throughout your development process. The steps are usually called sprints and they are smaller and achievable chunks of your project that can be completed quickly (daily, weekly or within two weeks maximum). Upon completion of the sprint, the team can review this smaller piece and ensure that it is working and is exactly what you wanted to develop. If it is not working how it was intended to, then at least you caught it early and can now make the correction necessary. Additionally, the mistake didn’t cost you too much time or money and you can get back on track fast. This code, review, and analyze approach is the best way to determine the next steps. Agile project management allows you to respond to issues as they arise – coding can be expensive, re-coding is even more expensive.

Continuous deployment is a set of processes that allow for small, frequent changes to the production environment. These set of processes automate your developer’s ability to commit their code into production environment without affecting the rest of the site. continuous delivery deployment There are lots of processes and each one can be introduced at different stages of your business. Implementing continuous deployment will allow you to be more agile and efficient.

Once you launch your Minimal Viable Product or Feature, you need to track and analyze how users use your product. You can also uncover usability issues by determining where users stumble. You can also track what the most used features are make decisions on which features you should improve and what new features you should build. This is an ongoing process and analyzing how users actually use your product is the only way you can improve your product

Most early stage businesses fail not because they have the wrong technology but because they don’t have a well defined business model…

how they are going to make money. If your business idea doesn’t solve a real problem for people, you will have a hard time surviving. REGARDLESS OF THE TECHNOLOGY. It is the first six steps that ensure that you have the right business model and help you prove to yourself that you are solving a real problem..one that people are willing to pay for. Steps seven, eight, and nine, will ensure that you can build your product in the most efficient way so you can iterate quickly, take smaller risks, and have a greater chance of success.