Entering a highly competetive market

According to Statista, more than 100,100 new apps are uploaded to Google Play every month. To beat this competition, you need to start developing new products faster without compromising quality. So, let’s talk about how to do just that.

It’s impossible to come up with a new Google in a day. But venture capital industry logic can help us there — if you invest in ten different projects, seven of them will not be successful and two will only bring a small profit. But one is likely to become a successful company. However, we don’t know which project that will be.

That same Google started out as a web search company. It took the founders decades to differentiate the business — and plenty of its projects were shut down along the way. What do we do to achieve the same success?

Cutting Time To Market

Unlike Google, you and us do not have decades. We cannot afford shut down projects either. Let’s look into what IT companies do to solve these problems.

To cut Time to Market, product managers make sure to:

• Update the tech stack on time to eliminate the main causes of developers’ inefficiency;
• Constantly hire new specialists.

The second choice is reasonable — more developers means more chances they come up with revolutionary features. But helping them work more efficiently is not as simple as it sounds.

According to that same venture industry logic, the more projects your team takes on, the more it will be able to achieve. When it comes to reality, teams often reach the opposite: the more tasks they have, the longer lead time will be. Why is that? Well, a number of reasons may cause this, for example, lack of metrics that allow to track employees’ performance, no proper team structures or communications between departments, as well as shifting goals.

These issues usually result in:

• Gaps in the tech stack, including no proper testing workbenches;
• Discontinuous business operations, such as unclear approval process;
• Human errors.

Implementing the right practices

To fight such issues, we at AINSYS have implemented the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. This job evaluation scheme allows proper goals definition and monitoring performance by introducing a fixed task number per quarter, as well assigning the right developers for each task. The implementation allowed us to halve Lead Time.

But our work did not end there since backlog was another feat to overcome. Backlog issues can stall the entire development team. Sometimes figuring out what features are necessary and what aren’t gets complicated.

The secret is proper stocktaking ― once you describe all tasks in detail and choose a developer with the right qualifications, backlog will stop being an issue.

Product analytics

A quality app cannot be developed without a roadmap that would include info on clients’ needs. One of the best solutions for structuring data, building funnels, and proper testing hypotheses is Amplitude.

Analysis helps to identify all the blind spots. It’s easy to miss obvious issues when you’re working on something as large as the next Google. For example, thanks to Amplitude, we found out that connecting chats is a good way to improve the Stickiness metric. After we implemented that feature, Stickiness increased by 23% and the number of use days increased by 11% compared to those who had chats disabled (both groups had the same results before tests).

Setting the right goals

Every company’s goal is to profit. However, you can’t come up with a new Google just for the sake of revenue. Try to digitize your goals. Say, your business already has the NPS of 8. That’s a good result and it usually takes companies years to achieve. But it also means that some customers were unsatisfied, so we want to set the goal of 10 NPS.

The KPI system requires us to outline how much time it will take us to achieve this target. But OKR is different. According to this model, we need to be asking ourselves “How much closer did we get to our target today” and do so daily. This always greatly motivates us.

AINSYS has become the best helping hand to companies that are looking to enter a highly competitive market. Our developers are ready to help you solve any automation and integration issues. We know that locating the best software for fitting a specific business need and closing skills gaps can be challenging. But we can help you with that.

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