What are the most innovative platforms for product development?

In the pursuit of innovation, it's crucial to avoid the allure of new and trendy tools. For serious endeavors in architectural, mechanical, and electrical engineering, it's vital to acknowledge the enduring value of established platforms like Autodesk, SolidWorks, and Altium. These industry staples offer a plethora of sophisticated and innovative features, facilitating seamless collaboration and fostering top-down design methods. The choice of tools should be guided by the expertise within your workforce, ensuring efficiency and mastery in their application. Unless you're a fresh startup hiring recent graduates, the selection of tools should be rooted in the capabilities of your team.

To me it is not about the tools, it is about the power to be creative, have good ideas and innovate. I always use an example of a painter. I can buy the most expensive paint, the most expensive paint brushes and use the best slik to paint on, but I 'm not a true artistic painter. So my painting won't be great. But if you have a true artist painter, give his the cheapest paint, cheap brushes and an old wooden panel, he can still paint something very beautiful.....

With a 15-year background in Ed-Tech and Publishing, I've significantly contributed to the development of innovative product platforms. My active involvement in both fields, understanding customer needs, and proposing solutions to their challenges has provided unique insights and expertise that directly inform these platforms. In Ed-Tech, I've helped enhance features for better educational solutions, while my Publishing experience has informed content management and user engagement tools. I've also bridged the gap between these sectors to create versatile solutions. Overall, my hands-on experience has played a crucial role in shaping these platforms to meet industry needs

If you are part of a bigger organisation with a well established design team to support you, then as a product manager you might not really need to get your hands dirty and work on these design tools. But in my experience, if you are just starting your product journey or part of early stage product team, it’s always good to learn to use these design tools as well. While you might not be doing the entire designing of UI, knowing how to use these tools can be beneficial in some of the following ways: - you can make small changes and get them to implementation quicker, this severely increases speed by cutting down back and forth with design team for minute changes - you can quickly draw up a mock UI and use it to run some usuability studies

Now a days we are having many platforms which are used for the product development. The main point to be remembered is apart from n no of platforms in which platform or in which tool you are flexible to work easily. and along with it you need to select tool which are having more features and making the work go fast

It's not just about which tools to use but also how to use the tools. In the symphony of product management, the user's voice should play the lead melody. Their needs, aspirations, and pain points form the backbone of our product roadmap. Yet, how often do we find ourselves charting territories based more on intuition than real user feedback? An emerging practice among product owners is to label stories that carry direct user evidence. Whether it's Jira, Github, or any other issue tracker, this seemingly minor addition can revolutionize your product management strategy.

As an Ed-Tech and Publishing expert with extensive experience in both fields, I've actively contributed to and recommended the development of collaboration platforms. These platforms play a pivotal role in facilitating seamless coordination, task management, and progress tracking, enabling diverse users, including students and instructors, to create and share interactive materials, fostering creativity and collaboration. My input has been instrumental in shaping these platforms to enhance efficiency, collaboration, and ROI, particularly in the ever-evolving digital education landscape.

The easiest way to explain your idea to the support, developers teams, or CEO is to visualise the value creation process. I always ask my colleagues to create schemes or diagrams that reflect the process participants, the process itself and the relationships between participants. For this, we use sequence diagrams, and one of the great services for creating, distributing and integrating them into your documents is mermaidchart.com, which I recommend everyone to use from my own experience.

I've personally found Azure Boards in Azure Devops to be a somewhat underrated but amazingly useful platform for tickets. Having worked with both JIRA and Azure Boards I can say Azure Boards also offers a very decent level of flexibility and integrates with Testing and Dev. functions, even with Github. You can customize the workflow as per the software dev. methodology and the board, ticket structure and a lot more. Most features of JIRA are matched but for the JIRA align roadmap but we use external tool for that. We've found the dashboards great too and highly customizable incl. power BI charts.

Drawing from our experience in Ed-Tech and Publishing, we understand the importance of testing platforms in our process. In one project, we addressed a critical pre-launch integration issue with an LMS. In another, we successfully overcame the challenge of pairing with a Virtual Learning Environment through rigorous testing. We always conduct thorough testing before platform launches, pivotal for validating products and identifying issues. Moreover, we prioritize user feedback to ensure our solutions are thoroughly prepared. Testing platforms provide valuable insights into user needs and behavior, enhancing product stability and integration with other tools, and fostering a comprehensive approach to development.

It is important to have a testing platform. Also from idea to validation and testing it is important to keep the customer angle in mind. Finally end of the day, customer perception mattera the most. While testing , best statergy is to keep room for improvement, ie: the person providing the feedback mustnot feel that thd product is final. You will get most genuine and honest feedback and suggestions for an unfinished looking product than a seemingly looking final product. This is from my personal experience.

Writing a guide on product validation could fill an entire book! But narrowing down to analyzing user feedback and choosing the right testing platforms, I gravitate towards Hotjar and Google Analytics. I typically turn to Google Analytics to drill down into specific pages that aren't hitting their marks, and then I use Hotjar to dive deeper into the user experience to uncover why. For a broader understanding of user behavior, Hotjar is my go-to. When it comes to QA and setting up testing processes, particularly if we're not relying on a QA specialist for manual testing, Selenium is my top pick for setting up automated bug discovery.

It's important to have tools that work for your team, but don't forget to prioritize rituals. Rituals bind teams together, establish a communications cadence, and form the culture of your product development org. It's becoming easier and easier to swap out tools. But don't make the mistake of thinking that tools can solve all of your product development challenges.

Tools are essential, but they shouldn't dictate your process; instead, your process should shape the choice of your tools, particularly in terms of how agile your workflow is. Having a more agile approach and shorter sprint durations calls for tools that are not only easy to use but also offer a streamlined set of features. This ensures quicker adoption and integration within the team.