Product Development, Business Owner, Sprintat, Business Growth | 3 min read
It would be nice if business growth happened organically, but in most cases, any organic growth business experience happens slowly, which is why business owners like yourself should consider the different ways the can stimulate business growth in 2019.
Your business's value proposition is a written statement that outlines what sets your business apart from your direct competitors and why customers should purchase from you. Even though the value proposition is a key component in a business's brand image and marketing strategy, a surprising number of businesses never create a value proposition. The failure to have one can make it difficult for the business to experience future growth.
The information you to include in your value proposition is:
Keep redrafting your value proposition until it is a fluid read at which point, post it on your website's homepage as well as the landing pages for all your sale funnels.
Your employees are more than just people who complete the business-related tasks you assign them. They're the face of your company and just as important as your brand image. If utilized properly, they can also be the key to your 2019 business growth.
Take a long look at your employees. Read through their resumes. Ask them what aspects of the business interest them. You may find that a large portion of your team has skills and talents you can utilize to make your business run more smoothly than ever before.
Use what you've learned and apply it when you're hiring. You want to invest in talent. Don't just look for somebody who meets your current needs, but someone who has the skills you'll need once your business grows.
Has your business experienced steady product growth over the past few years or has your business hit a plateau? If you've plateaued one launching a new product is something you can do to trigger a new surge of business growth. While there is some risk connected to developing and launching a new product, there are also some great rewards, which include:
When it comes to taking your business and shifting it to a more product-based development, you'll want to memorize the seven-stages of product development.
You can choose to handle every single aspect of new product development in-house, or you can decide to outsource some parts.
If you feel that developing a completely new product is too risky, you may want to opt for redesigning and branding one of your current products that haven't been garnering many sales. A good product redesign can trigger as much business growth as developing a new product.
Yes, Facebook does have issues. Yes, the number of people your posts reach through organic means is limited. Still, you shouldn't ignore your business's Facebook page. When push comes to shove, with more than 2.23 billion monthly active users, Facebook still has the most active users per month than any other social media platform. You can't afford to not use your Facebook business account to promote your brand and products/services.
Happily, there are things you can do to get the most out of your Facebook business page.
Instead of posting nothing but promotional content, post things behind the scenes glimpses of your business, bits of trivia, and educational content. These are the posts that are likely to generate engagements and shares. Keep the number of promotional posts to 20% or less.
Create engaging ads that promote either your product or business and run them on Facebook. Measure your ads every 24 hours and tweak them for optimal performance. Set aside a minimum of $100 for your Facebook advertising campaign.
Webinars are a great way to generate interactions with your page. Educational webinars hardly cost anything to put together and run, and Facebook users love them, making them a brilliant form of advertisement with a high ROI. A Q&A style webinar which is fun for both you and your audience.
Facebook Insights does an excellent job of compiling data that helps you get the most out of your business page. Paying attention to the data allows you to target both your posts and advertising efforts to the most responsive audience. When utilized correctly, you'll find that both your organic and paid posts generate higher engagements, which in turn, results in Facebook driving more traffic to your website.
The type of data Facebook Insights provides business owners includes:
While you're working to improve your business's Facebook page, you should also look at how you can boost your marketing efforts on other social media platforms.
Live events are a great way to promote your company and also lay the foundation for business growth. Your loyal customers will love an opportunity to get to know you better, and thanks to live streaming, you can even promote the event on your favourite social media accounts.
Good reasons to have a live event include:
What steps do you plan to take in 2019 to help your business grow?
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Originally published May 21, 2019 12:40:03 PM, updated July 15, 2019
3 min read
Businesses interested in experiencing growth have turned their attention to product development. The development of new products helps breathe new life into the business. The benefits connected to product development include:
While there are many benefits connected to product development, developing a new product isn't without risk. Only one out of every four products that enter the development stage will eventually be launched, and only half of those will meet the developer's expectations.
While there will always be an element of risk connected to launching a new product, one of the best way to mitigate the risk is understanding that one of the reasons so many newly developed products fail is because the company behind the design took a linear approach to the development project. Twenty or thirty years ago, this approach, which is currently called a first-generation approach to product development was highly successful, but things have changed. In recent years, businesses have switched to a style of product development that's called second-generation product development which allowed improved the efficiency of the process while also reducing wasted times and resources.
Recently, some businesses have discovered an even more streamlined method of product development: third-generation product development.
Three business have already made the jump to third-generation agile product development and have enjoyed impressive results.
When most people think about third-generation agile product development, they think of software and app development companies. However one of the companies that has enjoyed the most success after switching to third-generation agile product development is Toyota. Like all vehicle manufacturers, the company is constantly looking for ways to develop new products or improve current products, to do this, they turned to agile development techniques.
Toyota broke their product development management process into six groups:'
Once Toyota set up the organization modules, they created cross-functional teams who worked towards a common goal. Rather than scheduling regular meetings which were time-consuming and slowed the product development product, Toyota urged the heads of each project squad to communicate in writing. When a squad identified a potential risk or the teams reached a major disagreement and face-to-face meeting was arranged.
The success of Toyota's third-generation agile product development process was visible when they successfully brought the RAV4 mini-sport-utility vehicle from the idea stage to product launch in just 24 months.
When PayPal decided to move to agile product development, they created 510 different cross-function teams. They then created a 4-pillar system to improve operations and app development. The company spoke to managers, engineers, and customers and identified ways that they could use agile development to improve their overall operations and launch an app. It took the company about 7 months to launch their new system. Once launched, the agile development practices triggered a 340% revenue increase.
When they decided to try agile product development, Vistaprint had just one goal. They wanted to decrease the amount of time it took to develop a new product. Prior to making the change to agile development, it took about 60 days for the company to go from the idea stage to product launch. After developing cross-functional squads, the company shortened the idea to launch time to a mere 15 days.
Third-generation product development focuses on the use of agile development techniques which enables businesses who are interested in developing software and apps to take a lean approach to developing a product which reduces risk. Once the company is satisfied with the early version of the software and app, they launch the product and start collecting feedback. The business uses the feedback to tweak the software/app, adding features and making improvements that trigger a surge in customer satisfaction.
Product development teams that used the third-generation agile development techniques, reported that:
There are 3 characteristics of third-generation agile product development:
First and second generation product development was a slow process, with it taking months, and sometimes even years, to take the product from the idea stage to product launch. Agile development is different. This third-generation style of product development is fast. The trick to getting the product developed and launched in a short period of time is the creation of product squads that handle multiple tasks simultaneously.
Sprintat has the resources, talent, and tools, to complete agile product development sprints in just 1-4 weeks.
Small groups of cross-functional teams who work on different aspects of a developing product are a key component of third-generation agile product development. Each team works on a specific module.
Module examples include:
Each project squad has a team leader who works with a creative manager who oversees the entire project to keep it on time. The creative manager is responsible for making sure each of the modular come together seamlessly when it's time to launch the new product.
The talent pool of cross-functional product development teams is so deep, that the team members identify risk issues early in the development process and quickly take steps to mitigate the problem. The development teams at Sprintat are trained to identify risks, prioritize the potential threat, and launch risk reduction plans.
Early risk identification paid off for the developer of medical devices who discovered that agile product development identified problems that would have reduced the overall performance of their device by 80% had the problem not been identified and corrected by a product development squad.
Sprintat specializes in helping business who lack the in-house development talent to fully utilize agile techniques while developing products. We help you fill those gaps by providing:
Contact us and schedule a meeting where you'll learn how our agile product development process helps your business grow.
3 min read
IT managers are playing a bigger role than ever before in how a business is run and its ultimate success. One of the questions many IT managers have found themselves asking is whether they want to be a part of a business that focuses on agile product development or one that favours a traditional project management plan.
Traditional project management is how most businesses handled product development and line improvement. The traditional style involves putting together a long, detailed timeline for each project and getting every single aspect of the product perfect before the official product launch.
Agile product development is the opposite end of the spectrum. When a business decides to use agile development to create a new product, they create multiple cross-functional product squads who each work on a specific aspect of the product. Key components of agile product development include:
While the concept of agile product development has been around for a long time, it didn't become a popular business tool until the turn of the century.
Traditional project management is the process most companies use when they decide it's time to develop a new product. The process follows a well-established process that goes from idea, to developing a prototype, to conducting consumer tests, to debugging the product, to releasing a fully developed product on the market. Businesses that use a traditional project management system never deviate from the formula. The tight timeline also makes it difficult to innovate the product mid-development to accommodate an unanticipated need.
History shows that the traditional model of project management was developed in the 1970s. Businesses quickly fell in love with it. The way the system works is:
Once the design has launched, the business rarely does anything to upgrade or improve the product.
The rigid and lengthy timeline traditional project management results in many promising products being discarded because they're taking way to long to develop.
Many believe that agile product development predates traditional project management by several centuries. They argue that if Sir Francis Bacon laid the groundwork for agile product development back in the 1620s when he created his scientific formula. While there are examples of agile development scattered throughout history, the Agile Manifesto wasn't created until 2001. Many businesses, including Toyota and PayPal, have adopted an agile product development strategy and have been very happy with the results.
Businesses that favour agile product development divide their talent into product project squads and break the total project into chunks. Each of the teams works in quick sprints to swiftly handle whichever part of the development process they've been assigned. Using this system, it doesn't take long for the product to launch. After the launch, data and customer feedback is collected. Once the teams have enough customer feedback, they tweak the product, making it extremely user-friendly.
While there are always going to be risks connected to product development, agile product development goes a long way towards mitigating those risks. A good agile product development system not only drastically shortens the amount of time it takes to launch the product, but since customer feedback leads to constantly improving the product so that it's perfectly suited for your target market's needs and desires. The result is a high degree of customer satisfaction, which in turn leads to customer loyalty.
Benefits of agile product development include:
When it comes to software and app development, the biggest benefit of traditional project management is that the product is more polished on the launch date than products developed via an agile process. There aren't any plans to tweak the product to make it more appealing to customers, or more efficient.
Stakeholders like traditional project management. They appreciate getting a piece of paper that has the projected timeline, cost control measures, and assures them that once the product is released, it won't ever need to be changed.
Additional advantages connected to traditional product management include:
While there are some industries that should focus on traditional project management, others, including software and app development businesses, should seriously consider converting to agile product development. Most businesses report that when they switched to agile product development, they developed products 37% faster than they had before and noticed a 16% increase in productivity. The same companies also reported a significant increase in annual revenue.
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Sprintat's people are agile product development masters. We have extensive experience helping clients just like you develop both software programs and apps. Schedule a meeting today and learn how we can help you take your high-quality idea and turn into a lucrative product. We have a Sprintat team standing by who is ready and willing to provide you with the design advice and tools needed to make the concept of your design a reality.
Contact us to learn more! We promise we'll never hit you with any false estimates, eagerly collaborate with both you and your employees, and will help you create the best possible product.
4 min read
As businesses continue to supercharge their application life-cycle and rapid app development becomes glued to modern IT frameworks, these shifts are disrupting the way that we think about IT contribution. In the past, development and operations have both been measured by the effort that they put forward on a specific project. The more hours and successful code or operations that you bake into a particular project, the more successful you seem. But, can progressive frameworks as agile development survive in this mentality?
This question has been bounced around for a few years. If the goal of modern development frameworks is to spread responsibility and increase collaboration, does it really make sense to standardize success based on individual contributions? Better yet, is the success of an app measured by metrics that track time contributions and individual efficiencies? Or, is it measured by the value of the end product?
While agile shifts the app cycle left, businesses have to adjust the mentality driving their culture to base success on value, not projects. In 2019, we're seeing thousands of companies change their outlook and culture surrounding the software development life-cycle. Here's why companies are switching from project-based development to product-based development.
"There are both business products and IT products. A product is simply something that has a customer base that it delivers value to." - Carmen DeArdo, former DevOps tech director at Nationwide Insurance [InfoQ]
Before we discuss how product vs. project-based design impacts IT managers, who typically are one of the first to on board the new mentality, we need to understand the differences between products and projects (in terms of the dev life-cycle).
A product is something that satisfies a business or market need. So, that latest automated security software — that's a product. One of the main distinctions between products and projects is that products exist in a life-cycle. From inception to market introductions to continuous updates, products typically last until customers no longer have a need for the solution.
A project is a temporal venture that's undertaken to develop a product. So, instead of being viewed from a lens of semi-permanence, projects are purposefully set to a time-frame.
At first, it may seem like products are the spawn of projects. That's completely correct. So, what does it mean to reframe your dev life-cycle to product-focused instead of project-focused if projects created products?
Now that we know what a product and a project are, let's talk about them in terms of the software development life-cycle.
Project-based development involves thinking of the development and operation of an app as temporary. Employees are typically measured by the effort put forward towards a specific project, and each project could use temporary workers, unique processes, and hyper-specific strategies. This means that projects are often ad-hoc.
Product-based development is a more permanent way of thinking about applications. So, employees are judged on their contribution rather than their individual metrics. This means that product-based development can be thought of as a complementary mindset to agile frameworks. In product-based development, apps are viewed from a perspective of whole-life-cycle-development as opposed to temporary app pipelines.
Let's look at why so many businesses are choosing to move towards product-based design.
One of the key benefits of agile frameworks is the ability to use automated practices throughout the software development life-cycle. But, if development cycles are thought of as temporal, finding ways to justify the expense of automation is difficult. What's the point of automation if it isn't really a core part of your life-cycle? If your business is simply using automation ad-hoc to deal with project-by-project needs, the time and costs associated with automation adoption are likely unnecessary.
But, thinking of the development life-cycle as product-based gives you the flexibility to create business-wide processes that lean on automation to eliminate redundancies. Of course, this saves time and money — which was the point in the first place.
When you think about apps in the light of temporary, it's difficult to glue customer-centricity to your Dev and Ops thought processes. The ultimate goal of any good app is to deliver value to the user. But, if the incentives behind the project are based solely on metrics and individual contributions, convincing devs and op managers to focus on value is difficult.
The project-based design makes this easy. Since value is glued to the project-based design framework, providing value is the goal — not the app itself.
Another significant benefit of product-based development is the ability to spread collaboration. Everyone becomes responsible for the entire app, which means that everyone is invested in the success of the whole application, not just "their" part.
With the product-based design, value is placed on collaboration, not employee-by-employee contributions. Trying to build an agile framework under the microscope of project-based design devalues the entire architecture that makes agile so powerful.
Again, responsibility-spread is an intrinsic benefit of product-based design. Remember, value is coming from app success — not employee success. This means that Dev and Ops don't share separate responsibilities, they share the same one. All that matters is how the app satisfies customers. That's the be-all-end-all of product-based design.
Hiring employees by the project forces fractured dev environments. Even further, basing employee performance on specific projects — which often require role-switches and different metrics — creates bubbles in the development cycle. Goals aren't viewed as long-term, because the app is viewed from the perspective of temporary.
With the product-based design, employees are responsible for the app throughout its lifecycle, which includes post-launch continuation. Of course, the product-based design requires a more temporary outlook on employee roles, which means that employees can focus on the roles that they excel at.
One of the most significant challenges facing Dev and Ops teams in the current agile environment is their mentality towards app development. In the past, the software development life-cycle has been thought of as a group of temporary projects that push out applications. Instead, try thinking about apps as more permanent products. Of course, you can still plan projects. This isn't about a specific process or strategy; it's a complete change in mentality and culture.
To be fair, this isn't a new concept (see Apple and Amazon). But, we've witnessed product-based design explode over the last few years due to the necessity of automation and extreme agility.
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Businesses interested in experiencing growth have turned their attention to product development. The development of new products helps breathe new life into the business. The benefits connected to product development include:
IT managers are playing a bigger role than ever before in how a business is run and its ultimate success. One of the questions many IT managers have found themselves asking is whether they want to be a part of a business that focuses on agile product development or one that favours a traditional project management plan.
As businesses continue to supercharge their application life-cycle and rapid app development becomes glued to modern IT frameworks, these shifts are disrupting the way that we think about IT contribution. In the past, development and operations have both been measured by the effort that they put forward on a specific project. The more hours and successful code or operations that you bake into a particular project, the more successful you seem. But, can progressive frameworks as agile development survive in this mentality?