How Software Products Can Accelerate GTM

Customer expectations constantly evolve quickly, compelling organizations to respond faster than ever. As Jeff Bezos pointed out in one of his shareholder?letters, "People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday's 'wow' quickly becomes today's ordinary."?

Maintaining a relentless focus on customers' wants and evolving market trends demands enterprises develop their capacity to accelerate the Go-to-Market for software products.

Business profitability has always been linked with the capacity to leverage market opportunities. With the current uncertain economic climate, enterprises must upgrade their software development capabilities to respond to market and customer needs on time to create business opportunities.

Some of the challenges that impede speed can be identified as follows:

• Lacking development expertise in taking single-line product ideas and developing them into a full-fledged, working product
• Lower breadth and depth of technical knowledge to develop future-ready products
• Inept resources to evaluate product evolution trends and evolving customer demands
• Poor domain knowledge and, consequently, poor technology-specific choices
• Dated software architecture, workflows, and processes
• Refactoring challenges when upgrading products emerging from spaghetti code
• Very high technical debt
• Poor product development practices and unclear roadmap

These are some of the main GTM challenges of s/w product companies. Navigating these challenges enables the capacity to go to market faster and leverage market opportunities. To that end, here are a few things to do to help software products accelerate GTM:

Develop an MVP

Taking a single-line product idea and releasing it into the market on time needs a solid MVP. Embracing the?minimum viable product (MVP)?approach allows organizations to release a product with minimal features.

The product features mostly focus on only the most crucial part of the value proposition for the user and can be immensely helpful to test product performance, evaluate user sentiment, and then take a data-backed approach to enhance the product.

Prioritizing the right features and defining a scalable technology approach becomes crucial to ensure the MVP paves the way for faster GTM. It also provides development teams have clarity on what features should be added or eliminated to enhance customer experience and drive product success.

Increase Automation Focus and Shift Testing Left

It is crucial to automate repeatable processes wherever possible to accelerate development velocity. However, accelerating developmental velocity should not come at the cost of quality. As such, testing must shift left and leverage test automation to release high-quality, reliable products into the market faster.

Manual testing remains essential; however, it must be complemented with automation to ensure that bugs and errors do not slip through the cracks. Manual testing can be very time-consuming and error-prone, especially when it comes to effort-intensive and repeatable tests. Bugs found later in the developmental process increase costs and delay GTM.

Develop a Clear Product Evolution Roadmap for Smart Technological Decisions

Developing a clear product evolution roadmap is critical to accelerating GTM. Building this clarity drives better decisions when it comes to technology choices. The breadth and depth of technological expertise and domain knowledge come into play here. These determine how customer demands will evolve. They also account for how the technology landscape will change.

These considerations drive decisions regarding technology stacks, make functional choices faster, create robust testing strategies aligned with development, reduce reworks, accelerate development velocity, and ultimately help the product reach the market more quickly.

Increase Focus on Collaboration

A collaborative approach to software development also increases development velocity and agility. Philosophies like?DevOps?are becoming extremely popular for this very reason.

The coming together of testing, development, and operational teams helps organizations reduce communication lapses that lead to time waste and onerous overwork. It is also easier to spot errors, fix them quickly, and build a comprehensive and dependable product with all perspectives in place.

Getting things right the first time around becomes possible with a collaborative approach, thus, increasing the capacity to go to market faster.

Facilitate Access to Technical Expertise

A collaborative approach to software development also opens opportunities to leverage specialized technical skills. Organizations must ensure that they can be highly flexible in the face of the accelerating pace of technological change.

As new-age technologies mature and the technical skills gap widens, organizations must identify ways to elevate their technological capacities to deliver high-performing, cutting-edge technology products into the market faster.

Leveraging nearshoring or offshoring is an intelligent way to navigate the skills shortage while maintaining control over?product development. Selecting a nearshoring development partner with the right technical, domain, and engineering expertise augments the internal software development team. It elevates and accelerates development confidence and helps release products faster to tap into market opportunities.

Employ Microservices and Adopt the Cloud

Organizations must also make complex technology choices that weave flexibility, agility, and speed into the development process. Looking at the architecture at work becomes extremely important here. Monolithic architectures are no longer the optimal choice as development becomes more iterative and updates, upgrades, and product evolution become essential for success.

Employing microservices architecture accelerates GTM since these are small services built separately that can be brought together to create large, complex pieces of software. The services address specific product elements and ensure faster iterations. It allows the product teams to innovate faster and continuously update the software without disrupting the?user experience. Modernizing products and releasing them into the market also becomes easier with microservices.?

It is also vital to leverage technologies such as the cloud to accelerate development by enabling faster collaboration, elevating the tools ecosystem, and developing the computational capacity to test more and faster.

The applications in the enterprise landscape are also becoming more complex. The demand for business systems to become infinitely flexible, fast-moving, and incredibly agile is also intensifying. As such, developing cloud-native products is no longer negotiable. Enterprises need to develop the expertise to leverage technologies such as Kubernetes,?serverless?functions, APIs, and containers to build resilient, manageable, and scalable modern cloud apps quickly and easily and get these products into the market.

Keep Technical Debt in Check

The road to MVP is paved with many shortcuts. As such, keeping an eye on the technical debt becomes important to release robust software products into the market that will see customer adoption.

Determining the volume of technical debt and resolving it on time accelerates GTM. Ensuring that the codebase does not become clunky and outdated also becomes essential to quickly developing and releasing a fully functional and performance-driven product into the market.

Making the proper technical considerations and architectural choices from the word go significantly enables this. Besides, enterprises must look at refactoring to optimize code design, enhance performance, drive behaviour-preserving transformations, improves code quality, and keep technical debt in control.

Conclusion

Accelerating GTM strategies is crucial because software development is no longer static and a one-time initiative. Software development is now a continuous process where the product development team must constantly monitor software performance and work on continuous product improvement.?

Enhancing development velocity ensures that organizations can capitalize on the market opportunity by delivering precisely what the customers want and when they want it and driving excellent business outcomes.?

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