Last updated on January 27th, 2021
Getting and staying ahead today has every company scouting for new ideas to drive
innovation. And while many manage to come up with mind-blowing ideas, when it
comes to executing them in the real world, they often fail.
The skills, attitude, and capability needed to forge ideas into reality are indeed at a
premium!
At Forgeahead, we like to say that the difference between ideation and innovation lies in
execution. Execution is everything. And it’s a sum of several parts. We focus on unifying
capabilities across UX design, Architecture, Development, Security, and Quality
Assurance into a flexible, collaborative, nimble service to achieve one aim – that of
turning concepts into code and ideas into game-changing software products.
The problem is not ideation, but execution
Software development organizations spend substantial time in coming up with new and
innovative ideas for products – to enter new markets, attract prospective customers,
improve customer experience, and offer features at a cost, speed, and quality better
than their competitors. They dutifully follow all the steps in the ideation phase: they
make the effort of identifying their target audience and assessing their needs that form
the foundation of the product they wish to develop. Once they have a list of ideas, they
market test them to validate viability and analyze how their audience will benefit from
the product. Yet, despite continued efforts in ideation or conceptualization, product
failure rates are exceptionally high.
So, what goes wrong? Experts cite many reasons:
- The product has a bad design
- The product aims to fix a non-existent problem
- The product offers a lackluster user experience
- The product is overly complex and customized
- The product has been built and presented sloppily
- The product is built using inappropriate technology
- The product is developed by a team that lacks the required capabilities
- The product is of poor quality or has not been tested sufficiently
- The product fails to scale as demand grows
- The product delivers poor performance under high load
You will note that very few of these reasons are linked to the inherent value of the
product idea. Most are, in one or the other way, related to poor execution.
The right approach to execution helps bridge the gap between ideation and innovation
In my professional career, I have seen many organizations struggling with failed
products because of their poor execution engine. You need substantial “product
building” horsepower to get from a great idea to a great product. To ensure your
product idea is translated into success, you need to focus on using the right tools,
technologies, resources, and approach across your execution process.
We have been designing user experiences that act as a competitive advantage for the
organizations we work with. We help them in architecting infrastructure that can be a
real cost advantage and build products that win in the marketplace. We believe that
while building products to achieve success, the execution must be focused on the
following:
- Built for scale: Modern customers expect products to offer a consistent user
experience – irrespective of where they are accessing the product from, what
time of the day it is, what season of the year, and what device they are using. To
build a product that delivers that experience as users and usage scales, you need
to focus on baking scalability into every aspect from design to delivery and
testing. That’s necessary to ensure your product performs equally well under
high load and seasonal spikes (or troughs) and offers a consistent UX at a global
level. - Built to last: Today’s products also need to offer high levels of flexibility while
keeping up with the latest trends. But with agility, they need to be resilient too.
The recent transformation that enterprise products had to undergo when the
majority of their users moved to work from home is a case study in why
resilience and agility are both important. Keeping Agile and DevSecOps
methodologies at the core of your execution process is a great way to build
products that are secure, fast, enduring, and nimble. Such approaches can not
only help you build rapidly; they can also ensure your product operates reliably
and improves continuously. - Built with a user-centric design: It’s all about the user. Building products that
cater to the fluctuating expectations of users is the only way to achieve
satisfaction and success. To incorporate a user-centric design, your UX architects
and UI designers need to
o Assess the competition and understand user personas
o Plan the flow of the user tasks and identify usability obstacles
o Brainstorm ideas, build wireframes and create prototypes
o Design screens and develop the layout
o Rely on responsiveness guidelines to ensure multi-platform success - Built by an experienced team of skilled professionals: The success of
products today depends immensely on the team that has built them. If the
product has the potential to deliver real value, it’s important to focus on making
the product ready to scale for a surge of real-world users. The engineering must
factor in scalability from day 1. An extension of that is performance. Any product
with flagging performance with growing usage, users, or load will rapidly lose
favor with the users. That’s one more factor for the engineering to build in. Given
the complexity, having an experienced team of skilled professionals work on
your product idea is a great way to give them form and set them in motion. A
proficient team can not only help build your MVP; it can also re-design your
interfaces or design a complete product from scratch – using the latest tools and
technologies.
In an age of intense competition, coming up with a marvelous product idea is only half
the battle. To achieve success, you need to be able to execute your idea in a way that
meets the needs of your customers while being relevant and competitive. Winning products must be built for scale, performance, and reach. I would like to call that “win-gineering” if I may!
