Why Software Product fails – top 10 reasons

Although there are many reasons why a software product may fail, it is crucial to pay attention to specific aspects when developing a product. While you may already be familiar with some of these aspects, it is important to emphasize their significance when building a software product.

1.????Users - Understanding your user base and developing a plan to expand it are crucial steps in the product development process. Before building a product, it is important to conduct user research and consider factors such as who will use the product, why they will use it, and what benefits it offers. When onboarding users to your web or mobile application, it is best to avoid requiring them to enter lots of personal information through a registration process. Instead, consider using popular identity providers like Google or Facebook for sign-on functionality.

2.????Usability – In today's market, users are unlikely to try a product more than once unless it meets a compelling need. Therefore, the ease of use and intuitiveness of your product is critical to its success. It is worth investing significant time and resources into making your product as user-friendly as possible.

3.????Requirement Analysis – Prioritizing user requirements that are intuitive and easy to use is crucial when developing a product. While you may have many requirements in mind, it is important to communicate these clearly to developers to ensure that they can effectively solve the problem. Remember that developers may not be able to fully understand the user's perspective without clear guidance.

4.????Lack of market fit - A software product that fails to solve a real problem or meet a market need may face difficulties in gaining traction and attracting users. Therefore, it is crucial to define specific product requirements and the problem it aims to address. Additionally, it's important to analyze similar products available in the market and identify any additional problems that your product can solve. Even if similar products already exist, a product can still succeed if it incorporates other best practices mentioned in this article.

5.????Bugs and Defects – Although every product is likely to have bugs, excessive bugs can increase the risk of failure. To mitigate this risk, product development teams often prioritize speed, pushing code to production as early as possible. To reduce manual testing and increase efficiency, it is important to focus on automated testing using various frameworks. All automated testing should be integrated into a scalable DevOps pipeline, with a quality gate to ensure that the product is not pushed to production until it meets the required standards.

6.????Reliability – The success of a product is closely tied to its reliability. Users expect applications to function correctly and without interruption. However, reliability can mean different things to different users, including financial stability or functional effectiveness. Unreliable applications can result from transaction failures, blank screens, or maintenance issues. To ensure the reliability of your application, consider partnering with trusted transaction providers and implementing scalable and highly available systems. Additionally, using technological frameworks can prevent downtime during production upgrades, allowing your application to continue running without interruption.

7.????Scalability – A system that experiences high loads can cause applications to fail, leading users to perceive them as unreliable. Reliability and scalability are two sides of the same coin, and scalability is crucial to ensuring application reliability under heavy loads. To achieve this, consider implementing auto-scalable applications that can handle varying levels of traffic and usage. By doing so, you can ensure that your applications remain reliable even when usage levels fluctuate.

8.????Security Consideration – Ensuring the security of your application is crucial to its success, as users are unlikely to engage with an application that they perceive as insecure. It's important to adopt an outside-in perspective and consider potential security threats from the user's point of view, such as unsecure websites, data breaches, and malware or viruses, as well as internal security considerations for your application. By taking a comprehensive approach to security, you can build trust with your users and safeguard your application from potential threats.

9.????System performance – Nowadays, users have exceptionally high expectations, and may expect a webpage to load in less than a second. Therefore, it is crucial to perform load testing on your application and not release the product until it meets the user expectations. Often, the performance aspect is overlooked while focusing solely on the functional aspect, but this may lead to losing users.

10.?Lack of innovation - If a software product does not offer unique or compelling features, it may struggle to stand out in a crowded market. So continuous innovation is very crucial to stand out a product in the market.

Finally, it's important to track various key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the system's performance, including user statistics, response time, throughput, error rate, availability, and latency. Creating an observability dashboard that displays the application's overall health in one place can be helpful, and any potential issues should be addressed promptly by the SRE team. Automation can be used to alert the team about any issues before they become major problems.