5 Things I learned from building Enterprise products

Product Development is an art. It really takes a bunch of artists to craft and make software products that work. Being in the consumer end for long using those type of products on daily basis (from emails to all the other apps) and growing along with it, Although Enterprise app share similar traits with a consumer app, it has few extra dimensions. The target audience is different, the product design is different and the way it is developed is totally different.

Over my stint of working with Enterprise app I released a lot of things, some the good way and others the hard way. This blog is about the 5 things I learned that interestingly applies to most of the Enterprise products.

You cannot make every customer happy

It is true, you cannot make every customer happy. You may have the best featured app that does pretty much everything you think they need and may have a huge customer base too, but wait! There will be that one customer who may not find it happy or may need the 100th feature that is not present leaving all the 99 available ones at hand.

You may need to find a workaround, or build that feature into it or worst may need to leave that Customer off the table. You can never be sure what everyone needs and can never make all your customers happy. The important this is to keep majority of your customers happy.

Your product gets outdated faster than you think

Once you have built the product, you roll it out and you have a happy set of Customers using them and growing them. Just when you think your product is perfect, you are outdated! There are new technologies coming out and people are finding new ways to get things done faster and better and your customers’ needs grow as well. So your cutting edge piece of work now becomes old history. Software do age out like humans and they do fast.

It is very important to keep it updated in terms of features and technology to make sure you are not aging out and your customers keep getting what they need

MVP will never be perfect

Releasing the MVP or Alpha version of the product after through testing and validation hoping that it would be perfect is absolute hoax. Just as you release your MVP, you would find issues creeping up from nowhere. Your software still goes packed with missing features and software issues. MVP is just the launch of your product as potential step of validating that it works, not that it is perfect.

Product is a commodity but people are rare and valuable

Behind every successful product (and some failed ones too) are actual people who spend their sleepless nights and smart brains to figure out and get the product done. From the conceptualist till the sales and support, all of those are the reason why the product is out and running. Various similar or even better products will come up and product gets killed all the time. But the talent pool is hard to find

A happy team products better results and less buggy product.

Enterprise product are bug free

This statement needs no explanation. Any product cannot be bug free and enterprise products are no exception. While it may come with a solid development and commercial backed support, it does not mean it is error free. In fact some of the legacy products are error prone when they are upgraded to newer versions.

Proper practices and standards ensure the rate of errors can be reduced.

If you like this blog. Be sure to read out my other blogs on Agile to find out process and best practices on Enterprise product development.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/novel-approach-agile-software-engineering-process-part-sgs

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/novel-approach-agile-software-engineering-process-part-sgs-1

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/agile-action-tools-trade-shankar-narayanan-sgs

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/stack-up-selecting-your-next-api-service-like-boss-sgs

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/stack-up-selecting-your-next-application-like-boss-sgs