When commencing work on a new product, project or initiative, there needs to be a high degree of alignment between interested parties. This alignment ensures firstly that there is a legitimate need for the new product to be built, but also that the capabilities being delivered by the new product meet the stated needs of the project team.
Over 66% of software projects fail. Proof of concept (PoC) development can help to reduce this risk of failure significantly. Testing a software project’s most basic functionality with a PoC can help teams evaluate feasibility and validate market needs before investing significant time and money into a project.
Many startup founders ask if they should even bother with a proof of concept. Why not just go straight to working on a minimum viable product (MVP)? The truth is MVPs require significant capital investments - often $35K+ with US developers. That’s a lot of cash to invest in something that might end up being part of the nearly 90% of startups that fail.
User interface design (UI design) is all about building interfaces with an emphasis on aesthetics and personalization. As a UI designer, your goal is to produce an interface that is both user-friendly and looks aesthetically beautiful to the user. To build an interface that best suits the user's needs, you must take care of all possible interactions a user can make with your product.
Before we start considering what a 2x developer actually means, it might be helpful to sort out what the mythical 10x developer means. According to techopedia entry. A 10x developer is an individual who is thought to be as productive as 10 others in his or her field. The 10x developer would produce 10 times the outcomes of other colleagues, in a production, engineering, or software design environment.
When you think about what motivates an employee, what initially comes to mind might be a good salary and perks like a gym membership or free lunches. These types of motivators are called extrinsic motivators. They can be easily replicated and become a widely-adopted standard amongst companies. In fact, employees have come to expect a certain amount of perks from tech companies these days.
Ever since it’s inception in 2001, the Agile Manifesto has been utilised successfully by many teams to deliver various projects and has been adopted as the favoured approach for software delivery teams. However, even before the Agile Manifesto was written, Agile ways of working were being used.Agile teams are those who deliver work packages in small and iterative ways.
If you’re a startup founder, the goal is always on to do more with less. You have to find a way to get your product to market quickly, efficiently, and effectively. Software development services for startups can help you achieve your business goals faster and more efficiently. But it’s important to understand the development process before you dive in.
The debate of build vs. buy software is far from new. Since the beginning of digital transformation processes, it has been clear that a personalised approach is key to user satisfaction. This is no longer a desirable feature, but an absolute must-have if you wish to keep up with your competitors. Software vendors have not lagged behind, and today there are a huge number of software solutions that can be useful for various companies.
Product development services are the fastest way to achieve product-market fit. By definition, product-market fit occurs when a product meets the needs of a market. Achieving product-market fit is essential for any company that wants to be successful.There are a number of ways to achieve product-market fit, but the most common and effective way is to use product development services.
APIs, or application program interfaces, are vital tools for businesses in all industries. They are at the heart of the most successful companies, powering everything from Google ads to shipment tracking. APIs have grown to be the “glue” that not only empowers technical innovation but also enables businesses to grow new revenue streams, streamline their go-to-market strategy and deliver more value to their customers.
If you have a great idea for a product, service, or business, the worst thing you can do is to dive in headfirst without taking the time to validate it. Idea validation is all about testing and researching your idea to make sure that it has potential. This can help you save a lot of time, money, and effort in the long run.
Software investments have hige impacts on internal processes and in gaining competitive advantage over competitors. Business that outgrow their compoetitors are often better in monitoring and measuring software Return on Investment. Their software RIO factors a grounded in real impact on the business.
A smart, committed product team is needed to develop a good, successful product. A product team has multiple roles that must understand the user's goals. The product team designs, develops, and launches the product after understanding user needs. People usually think product teams are composed of a small number of resources tasked with designing and developing the product.
The world is considered a global village and, due to this, there is greater access to the best talent to hire for software development project and related products and services. Cost-effectiveness, better human resources, and improved business results are important reasons why software development projects are outsourced to software development companies.
Software product development process has multiple stages including idea generation, requirements gathering and analysis, design, development, testing, and release to market. Being an iterative process, each stage involves certain activities and produces a number of deliverables that help as input to the next stage of the process. Product brief is a document that the product team develops at the initial stage of the product development process.
How can you ensure your product team is pointed in the right direction, without stifling them or micromanaging their work? An overview of the project in the form of a Product Charter that includes inputs and outputs in terms of the intended outcomes. The goal of the product development process, after all, is to understand customer needs, identify opportunities, define the boundaries of a solution, and prioritize those solutions.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a powerful tool that aids in the systematic integration of an organization with its customers. It records and maintains customer information, preferences, sales data, and every engagement of the customer with the company. The information helps the sales team to analyze the data and keep a record and update the customer records of all the interactions they have made from time to time and also make targeted sales.
Effective communication is the foundation of a successful project. Sadly, it doesn't always work as it is supposed to - and in fact, many projects face this problem. If you haven't used a communication plan in past projects, it's worth trying and discovering what benefits it may bring to you and your team.
Agile software methods have created a heated discussion between promoters of big-design-upfront (BDUF) and promoters of agile development methodologies. What appears to be at the heart of the discussion is a worry about the lack of documentation that is expected to be created as part of the agile development process.
Software requirements specification helps meet project goals and functional requirements, but the creation process can be tedious, puzzling, and messy. So, what are software houses or business leaders expected to do? Although there are no standardized solutions to their problems there are ways through which time and money can both be saved while minimizing the errors.
The Product Management team brings an idea to fruition for what has been at the conceptual stage to that of the actual usage by the end-user. They ensure the products and services offered are aligning with the market requirements for serving the customer needs. The PM team is also responsible for maintaining its corporate goals at every stage of the product development cycle.
The essence of growth of the organization and creation of a product begins by putting in place an effective winning team. And for startup organizations, the team size may be considerably smaller, and building them along with building the organization goes hand in glove. Building a team involves bringing remote workers to work on a common goal. And each of them may vary in their skills, thinking, personality traits, and demographic backgrounds too.
If you don’t develop software on a daily basis and on a large scale, it is highly likely, that outsourcing the process to a professional individual or global software development company (depending on the project’s size) is more effective compared to building and maintaining your own team. In this article, we are going to look at the key aspects of how to hire the best partner, let it be a small team or a leading global technology company.
An NDA is a commonly executed agreement between companies and outsourcing companies or software developers, which ensures that very confidential information disclosed during the software development process does not fall into the hands of the wrong persons. It also ensures that the recipients of the information do not disclose it to third parties.
Whether you’re about to embark on a large new software project and need to grow your team through outsourcing, or have made strategic decision with third parties, you’ll need to take great care and due diligence in selecting your partner. This article takes you through some high-level considerations and provided some tips to help you make sure you select the right partner and start the relationship off in the best way.
A properly-written software partnership agreement sets the parties' legal obligations, rights, and responsibilities, as well as assists in clarifying their mutual expectations and enhancing communication from the very beginning of the partnership. If you are commissioning software development, it is critical to have a decent software development partnership agreement in place to obtain and secure the product or tool you want to build.
Finding a software development partner might seem a little intimidating at first, in part due to the vast number of software development companies ready to deliver their services. However, the best tech talent is busy. That is why you need to be prepared to put effort into finding a good development partner and solid talent that is available at a reasonable timeframe.
You want working software delivered on time and on budget. That’s the goal. But the reality is IT projects, on average, end up 45% over budget while delivering 56% less value than expected. To stay in front of these abysmal statistics, you need a solid software development plan. Your project plan is your roadmap - a roadmap that tells you and all of your team how to achieve working software on time and on budget.
The value of the agile development model comes directly from the deep collaboration. However, when software vendors are added to the mix, companies often opt to use agile development internally, but leave the outsourcing provider to deliver independently, completely outside of the agile work streams.
Remote teams allow companies to tap into a larger talent pool and allow everyone to work where and how they are most productive. With effective communication, the right tools, and a remote-first culture, you can create more-effective software teams. This article we discuss how you can overcome the challenges inherent in managing remote engineering teams based on our own experience at SoftKraft.
Nowadays, it is much harder to find a company that does not use software to run their business operations than one that does. A lot of businesses will use off-the-shelf software, which comes with a fixed set of functions. If you find what's currently on the market isn't meeting your needs, you might go for custom software.
Digital technologies have taken over our lives on many levels. We hear about digital technologies, digital data, digital media, digital transformation, digital marketing. Following this lead, make digital transformations in our opinion have a huge impact on the future of many companies. But what exactly the digital transformation is? And why having a digital transformation strategy is important?
Estimation can be a tricky part of any new software initiative. Provide an estimate which is too high and your project may be cancelled before it even begins; estimate too low and your project has the risk of failing or being highly stressed due to perceived cost and time over-runs. If the project in question is a capital outlay on a new warehouse or improved machines in the factory, accurate estimates can often be prepared quite easily, as these are highly repeatable, low complexity initiatives where indicative costs and timescales can easily be stated.
Although similarly named, the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) are two separate and distinct processes for ensuring success within software delivery projects. Let’s take a look at how you can get the best out of both of these for your software delivery project:
Are you looking for a way to dramatically increase the level of performance of teams across your organization? Ownership mentality is the answer. No matter the size of your company or the teams within it, fostering an ownership mindset pays dividends: increased speed and agility, higher levels of performance, better innovation, more strategic leadership, and greater employee engagement and satisfaction. As a leader, you must ensure that your staff is fully invested in their work and committed to the larger goals of the organization.
Software project outsourcing allows you access to a diverse pool of tech talent that can allow you to move your project quicker and in a more cost-efficient way. In fact, 70% of companies outsource software development to save money. But outsourcing is not without risks.
In this report we have described each and every step which involves in software development scope of work with explanations of each. We have also mentioned pro tips for writing scope of work, also the key areas you will need to be more focused on in order to grasp better project development process throughout the project’s life cycle.
Accelerate’s ideas are intriguing because measuring the output of a software engineering organization is extremely difficult. Anyone who has given this issue serious thought has most likely encountered the ‘measuring the unmeasurable’ objection. In this article, I am going to focus on measuring productivity of software development teams, how to effectively measure software performance and giving examples of they are implemented.
One of the important sets of choices often overlooked by founders that causes this failure is organization design. Assembling a proper start-up team for a new and emerging start-up is consequently critical. In this article, we’d talk about how to put together the ideal start-up team, taking a look at the stages of building a successful start-up team. Who Are the Key Members to Hire? When Should You Hire Them? At What Stage?
This guide is expected to help other people in the business who have started or improved their own product security programs and empower the business’s wide selection of crucial secure improvement strategies. Much of this report is based on the experience of gaint organizations that develop their product based on Secure SDLC and is utilized by millions and at times billions of clients. Small level programming organizations ought to likewise have the option to profit from large numbers of these suggestions.
We have seen several tech startups build their software development team structure around the Spotify Model for structuring the software development team. However, research has shown that this model based on tribes and squads also comes with its pitfalls. There is no fail-proof model. This has led to questions about how to structure a software development team. In this guide, we cover the common software development team structures and the best practices to build an effective structure.
For every organization, there’s a need for solid structures to be put in place to aid the smooth operation and interaction between the various levels and departments. Software engineering organizations are no less different. For smooth operations and proper handling of projects, there is a need for an organizational structure.
Starting a software project can be difficult to know where to start a new software project. Although it is an exciting time proposing innovative new solutions, engaging with suppliers and building cool new software, there is a lot of up-front work which is needed to get the project off the ground. One easy and straightforward way of capturing the early details for your project is to use a templated approach.
When bringing a new product to market or looking to launch a new project internally, one of the most important things is to ensure that you validate your assumptions as early as possible so that you don’t waste time developing the wrong things. The term "Minimum Viable Product" describes such a process. Without a narrow focus on MVP, it’s easy for software development teams to spend a months building a system which turns out to be unfit for purpose.
As technology progresses and becomes more efficient, so should the programming languages that come along with it. Making important decisions like adding or expanding usage of technology like investing in your codebase has to be based on your use cases and supported with strong business benefits. In this article, you will learn what companies use PHP and what are their PHP use cases so that you can make better decisions.
AI document management systems are transforming the way in which a business operates. They are essential to ensure that organization employees are working with the most current and relevant data available. It also saves valuable time for your employees, which would otherwise spend in processing and organizing data from documents. In this article, we presented 7 different ways that AI can add value to your business.
Is Mapbox better than Google Maps? The question is a bit tricky since it depends on the needs of your specific application and features. In this article, we will look closer at how Mapbox compers with Google Maps and where it has an edge.
The stakes are high when you’re investing significant capital, resources, and time into an outsourced software development project. You want to choose the right vendor, but with over 23,000 companies offering custom development services on Clutch.co alone, the sheer number of options can be overwhelming.
![Product Validation — 12 Ways to Test Your Product [with Examples]](/uploads/blog/product-validation/product-validation.png)
![6 Essential Product Team Roles [Definitions and Resources]](/uploads/blog/product-team-roles/product-team-roles.png)
![Product Brief: Template & Writing Process Steps [with Examples]](/uploads/blog/product-brief-template/product-brief-template.png)
![Product Charter: Template & Writing Process Steps [with Examples]](/uploads/blog/product-charter-template-writing/product-charter-template-writing.png)
![How to Build a Custom CRM Software? [Practical Guide]](/uploads/blog/custom-crm-software/custom-crm-software.png)
![Communication Plan in Project Management [Practical Template]](/uploads/blog/what-is-communication-plan-in-project-management/what-is-communication-plan-in-project-management.png)
![Top 3 Product Team Structures — Which is the Best? [Pros & Cons]](/uploads/blog/product-team-structure/product-team-structure.png)
![How to Create Ownership Mentality [with Examples]](https://assets.softkraft.co/uploads/blog/how-to-create-ownership-mentality/how-to-create-ownership-mentality.png)
![Software Development Scope of Work [Template, Tips & Tools]](https://assets.softkraft.co/uploads/blog/sd-scope-of-work/scope-of-work.png)
![Secure Software Development Lifecycle [Practical Guide]](https://assets.softkraft.co/uploads/blog/secure-sdl/secure-software-development-lifecycle-v5.png)
