How to overcome technology constraints with continuous innovation? – A Guide for ISVs and Digital Businesses

Technology changes so fast that businesses must continuously adopt it to sustain themselves in a fast-growing digital world. To address the digital innovation needs of businesses in any domain, software product builders create meaningful solutions and products.

For start-ups, this task of innovating is quite thrilling. But once a start-up crosses the chasm and gets established, constant (or continuous) innovation may get too tiring. To succeed, innovation must be sustained. Even successful ISVs and enterprises feel the burden of continuous innovation. So, what can we do to ‘Keep Calm and Carry on’?

In our previous blog , we discussed the need to innovate continuously. Businesses usually understand the need. Yet, some fail to commit themselves to it. The reasons are many. Other than lack of time and unavailability of resources, technological constraints are a primary reason. Many established businesses despite being successful for decades, struggle to compete with disrupting start-ups and fast-growing competitors. In this blog, let us explore ways to overcome technology constraints while building innovative products. The older or insufficient the technology stack, the more difficult it is to modernize and innovate.

• Develop your products iteratively. Have achievable product engineering goals and inch towards them with smaller and more frequent releases. In iterative product development the requirements are revised regularly; hence the products have better chances of impressing consumers. This makes innovation easier and less burdensome.
• Automate testing. Testing offers a chance to make your products better. Timely and automated testing ensures that the standards are maintained. This helps products retain customers, grow steadily, and beat the heavy competition in the tough marketplace.
• Upgrade your methodologies, not just technologies. Implement Agile & DevOps. They are proven methodologies that help businesses respond faster to the needs of their customers and markets. They help you effectively manage platform upgrades, fix issues, and in maintaining the quality of your products and platforms.
• Overcome structural constraints of architecture, technology, and deployment. A huge technical debt is a big deterrent to competing with other businesses in your domain and retaining customers. Upgraded technologies also help you form and implement better strategies to reach the goals you intend to and embrace any opportunities.
• Manage knowledge continuity. Continuous innovation is not possible when knowledge is not retained and transferred. There are two ways to ensure knowledge continuity. Firstly, by using knowledge management solutions that diligently categorize, store, and make knowledge and data available at any employee’s fingertips. Secondly, by containing attrition. This is especially important when developing software products and not projects.

Continuous innovation, though essential, is very difficult to implement. Building products iteratively, automating testing to ensure thorough and regular testing, upgrading both methodologies and technologies, keeping the technical debt as narrow as possible, and ensuring knowledge continuity – these steps help ISVs, Startups, Digital Businesses, or even other businesses with software teams innovate continuously. However, following these steps diligently on their own is impossible, they require collaboration.

The best way is to choose a software product engineering partner who shares similar values, helps you grow, and supports you throughout your innovation journey. The development partner should have deep experience in providing thoughtful software products. Since the digital waves have blurred the boundaries between domains, focus of the innovators is on enabling frictionless customer journeys leveraging the mega shifts. In this scenario, what’s more important is the partner’s transparency, commitment, and low attrition. coMakeIT has been helping businesses overcome the blocks in their innovation journeys. Our collaboration objectives are wide and diverse – providing additional development capacities, extending revenue opportunities, productizing operational workflows, help with building intellectual properties, to name a few. Additionally, we ensure a low attrition across all the offshore development centers and dedicated teams we establish for our customers. For more details on our continuous product innovation services, please talk to us.