Getting digital products out to the market smart and fast is a critical success factor.
Are you struggling to increase and accelerate innovation in your company? To rapidly address market changes and demands with new, better ways of doing things? To develop and evolve digital products both to increase internal efficiency and to never stop growing and delighting customers? Well, this article is especially for you 🙂
We all know how tech talents are scarce, how tight budgets are, and how hard it is to find the perfect cost-benefit balance. Combining all this with the agility to successfully address a digital, fast-paced and global world is not easy. But there are some strategies you can embrace to not stay behind.
In fact, time to market is everything when we talk about innovation. It can mean the difference between leading a niche or facing big financial losses. In this context, we define it as the duration needed to bring a digital product to fruition: from idea to its whole design cycle, development, and launch.
What is the importance of time-to-market for digital products?
In today’s fast-paced digital world, time-to-market is critical for the success of any product. Time-to-market refers to the amount of time it takes to develop and launch a product from the initial concept to the final product launch. In the digital world, this can refer to the launch of a website, mobile app, or software product.
The importance of time-to-market for digital products can be seen in several ways. Firstly, it allows companies to stay ahead of their competitors by launching products quickly and efficiently. In a crowded market, being the first to market can give companies a significant advantage.
Secondly, time-to-market can help companies to reduce their development costs. By launching products quickly, companies can avoid the costs associated with prolonged development cycles and reduce the risk of the product becoming obsolete before it even hits the market.
Thirdly, time-to-market is crucial for meeting customer demands and expectations. In the digital world, customers expect new products and updates to be released regularly, and if companies are slow to respond, they risk losing their customers to competitors.
To ensure a speedy time-to-market, companies must focus on agile development methodologies, which prioritize speed and flexibility. By breaking down development cycles into smaller, more manageable chunks, companies can quickly identify and address any issues that arise during the development process.
In conclusion, the importance of time-to-market for digital products cannot be overstated. By launching products quickly, companies can stay ahead of the competition, reduce development costs, and meet customer demands. To achieve a speedy time-to-market, companies must focus on agile development methodologies and prioritize speed and flexibility.
How does time-to-market impact a company’s competitive advantage?
Time-to-market is a critical factor that can impact a company’s competitive advantage. In today’s fast-paced digital world, being the first to market with a new product or service can give a company a significant advantage over its competitors.
When a company launches a new product or service quickly, it can establish itself as a market leader and gain a larger market share. By being the first to market, a company can capture the attention of customers and generate buzz around its brand, which can translate into increased sales and revenue.
Furthermore, a faster time-to-market can help a company to reduce its development costs. The longer it takes to develop and launch a new product, the more expensive it becomes, as resources such as time, money, and manpower are required for the development process. By reducing the time-to-market, companies can avoid the costs associated with prolonged development cycles and gain a cost advantage over their competitors.
Finally, a faster time-to-market can help a company to respond more quickly to changes in the market and customer demands. By launching products quickly, companies can adapt to changing customer needs and preferences and stay ahead of the competition. This can help companies to build a reputation for innovation and agility, which can further enhance their competitive advantage.
In summary, time-to-market can impact a company’s competitive advantage by helping it to establish itself as a market leader, reduce development costs, and respond quickly to changes in the market and customer demands. Therefore, companies that prioritize speed and efficiency in their product development process can gain a significant advantage over their competitors.
What are the key factors that can help accelerate the time-to-market of digital products?
Check these 6 ideas to help ensure that your digital products reach their target quickly and efficiently:
#1 Validate your vision at the earliest possible stages. After figuring out the problem that needs to be solved and make some research, undertake discussions with stakeholders and hold brainstormings and requirements sessions to refine your idea. Then create a good plan and follow it, taking into account potential risks and how to deal with them. Set key dates, milestones, effective workflows and goals. The SMART technique helps you make sure that they are clear and reachable. Each one should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
#2 Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). In the Lean startup approach, the loop sounds like build an MVP, measure, learn. Eric Ries, described it as the version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. It’s not about creating minimal products; it’s about learning and improving from the first product release/iteration.
#3 Consider crowd testing. Ensuring digital products quality and an excellent experience is a must to succeed. From the ground up, in a truly customer-centric mindset. The problem is that traditional Quality Assurance can only give a partial viewpoint. This is when crowd testing comes in. It enables you to find more defects and usability issues, in less time and before they reach your target. Real users, similar to yours, detect bugs and make recommendations on how to improve the experience on any possible device.
#4 Use agile methodologies. In digital products creation, agile practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their end-users, adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continual improvement, and flexible responses to changes in requirements, and understanding of the problems to be solved. Popularized in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, these values and principles were derived from and underpin a broad range of frameworks, including Scrum and Kanban. As opposed to a traditional Waterfall approach, all this helps to create clear processes for development and testing that reduce time to market.
#5 Select the best tech stack possible. The tech stack is the combination of programming languages, frameworks, databases, servers, development tools and plugins, and other technology layers that make up digital products. Choosing the right one has a direct impact on time to market. There are several techs that ensure faster deliveries due to their less time to set up (and easier future scalability), ready-made modules, plugins and libraries (saving developers time) and transparent third-party integrations (making it easier to add functionalities without having to write code from scratch). Some examples involve Ruby on Rails, React Native and Python.
#6 Put outsourcing to your advantage. Reliable tech partners can help you in rolling out innovations at the speed of the business. Whether as the solo product development team or to enrich your internal one with some awesome extra hands. Guaranteeing the most suitable multi-disciplinary and high-performance squad for your specific challenges, the right skills and expertise, the proactivity to continuously add value, and the commitment you need to get things done on time and on budget. And totally hassle-free in terms of finding and retaining talents that are so scarce worldwide.
This and much more are offered by InnoTech 🙂 We have several collaboration models, one of them will certainly fit your needs. Count on our top-of-the-game talents to re-imagine technology and accelerate your digital products’ time to market – side by side. Let’s build your next innovation together!
