The changing rules of new product development
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Loading ...This is the first part of the series on New Product Development, specifically on Software Products. This series would primarily talk about the changing landscape of software product development, efficient product engineering, and what should be the core focus of software product companies.
There’s been a perceptible change which has been sweeping the VC funding landscape for technology companies for sometime now. This in turn has ground-shaking implications for how new products are built, the timeframe in which they are built, and the way development teams need to respond to this change.
Earlier, software start-ups used to be in the incubation mode for months on end. Business plans and financial projections were made for 5 year periods. Initial seed funding was typically in the $5mn range. But in today’s fast-changing world, companies can no longer be in stealth mode for years.
Hardware is cheaper, web infrastructure and cloud computing rule the roost, software libraries are ubiquitous and new technology/languages have crashed development timeframes. With the advent of Web 2.0 and social media, users have also become less technophobic and are willing to try products in beta mode much more and much earlier than ever before. Start-ups comfortably take a product to the market with seed investments of $100-500K in just a period of 4-6 months today.
The end-result of all this is that the rules for building software are changing. And, software companies have to understand and adapt to these changes before it’s too late!
Post contributed by Sabapathy Narayanan, Aspire Systems
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Comments
Thanks Rajendra for the comment. In fact, I believe this comment is for one of my other posts that I did on a related topic. In fact, I did not even think about CMMI when I wrote this. Now that you have brought it up, I thought I will add my 2 cents to it.
Firstly, this was written with the product companies in mind, where many of them do not really bother about getting themselves compliant to CMMI. The more I think about it, the point that you raised appears to me, more and more valid.
Agile and CMMI will probably combine the power of adaptability and predictability so well that either one alone cannot possibly provide. Successful software is typically characteristic of your ability to manage complexity, technology innovation and requirements change.
Managing complexity requires process discipline which the CMMI brings; and managing change requires adaptability which agile does really well. At the outset, I am not sure as to the number of product companies that would want to go the agile way in combination with compliance to CMMI.
To give you examples, I am just listing what is there on top of my mind as to companies that follow agile: Google, Gorilla Nation, RallyDev, IBM, eBay, Amazon etc.
Without compliance to CMMI level 2-3-4, can we ever say agile systems is doable….give me some examples