Great Product

Great Product and great Software is not hard to build if it gets done right from the beginning.

There are 7 crucial aspects that every Great Application, mobile or not, should take into account.

1. User experience

This is about the Perception of a user toward the usability and usefulness of your product. The development of the User Experience (UX) of your product must start on your prototyping phase. That’s when you initially test the interface and approach to the problem you’re trying to solve.

2. Availability

It refers to the readiness of an application to perform its functions. This is tightly connected to several technical factors but must be seen as a core operational requirement. Think how frustrating it would be to log in on a mobile app to realize its back-end services are offline.

3. Performance

It is the speed of the product perceived by the user. Independently of the several factors that affect communications like latency. There are four primary vital factors to consider on every great Software when we talk about performance:

Server or device resources and availability determine how well an application is served.
Code Quality determines how efficient is the internals of an application.
Data Query Optimization determines how fast it is in getting the data to be served
Compression, minification, and cache adds another layer to optimized performance

4. Scalability

Scalability is the capability to handle increasing volumes of data or operations. Modern cloud infrastructures like Azure or AWS allow applications to autoscale resources to adjust for the peaks in demand. However, code quality is an essential factor tightly connected to scalability. The worst it is the more need for resources to scale, and the more resources, the more expensive it is.

5. Adaptability

How easy can it be changed or configured to the user’s needs. There are two dimensions in application adaptability:

User: How easy is it for a user to change, toggle, adapt, and customize the product features
Code: How easy is it to change or extend (refactor) the code to adapt for new functionalities or features.

6. Security

Encryption, Authentication, and overall security measures SSL certificates are nowadays a common practice. However, data security assessments, penetration testing, and proper authentication mechanisms must be part of every modern product.

7. Economy

Building and operational cost. Optimizing the way Software is built is essential for a successful product. By minimizing the cost of each release, you achieve optimal operational efficiency. Above all, a controlled cost of operation allows you to channel resources for other areas that will make your product not only Great but Remarkable.

What to measure in a Great Product?

When building your product with your technical partner you should have a matrix to quantify these 7 aspects. You’ll need to monitor them through KPIs constantly. Here are some guidelines on what you should be looking for:

User experience

Measure and Quantify the user experience, and have it go through a set of participants to measure how easy it is to use your product. Get more insights on Metrics Driven Design by Joshua Porter.

Availability

Check if your technology provider has an SLA. Additionally, get acquainted with things like agreed service time (AST) and the amount of time that the service should be available over the reporting period.

Performance

Look for App Average Response Times, Error rates, Request Rates or even Apdex Score to understand how performant your product is.

Scalability

Is the product based on a Monolithic or Microservices architecture? Is it behind a cloud-based provider that can auto-scale? Do you have performance tests to evaluate the resources needed?

Adaptability

How easy is the product able to evolve? If you added a nice-to-have feature, how much would it cost? Get an insight into the code quality for static analysis code coverage and quality metrics. How many bugs

Security

What does your penetration test say? Do you have all paths of your product covered by Security Certificates?

Economy

Check for overhead on development tasks, returning development work with bugs from testing. These two metrics alone are sufficient to raise red flags. Of course, there is more to it. You can check, for instance, the three leading groups of characteristics that every software product must have to become Great. In essence, you have to find a Technical Partner that can understand these crucial aspects, as well as provide you with a framework that allows you to track them.