The product engineering market grew from $676.17 billion in 2016 to $1,003.12 billion by 2021. The exceptional growth is a result of digital products. However, the forecasts estimate that the market will touch $1,500 billion by 2023. How would such a rapid rise take place?
The pandemic is one reason. Covid-19 changed the dynamics of customer-company interactions. They became more digital. Software, applications, and solutions - all of them saw a steep growth. While convenience was one aspect, companies gradually focused on building a digital infrastructure.
The primary focus? Delivering multi-channel experiences. Physical interactions are necessary, but virtual is the future of customer experience enhancement. Therefore, engineering innovative products that connect organizations, stakeholders, and customers digitally is more important than ever.
Software Product Engineering: An Overview
Product engineering is the process of designing, developing, and deploying software products through collaborative efforts and innovative problem solving. Software development differs from product engineering in the sense of overall execution - the former deals with writing code and developing a product while the latter focuses on building products from scratch.
Engineering involves a broader approach that covers all aspects of the product rather than simplification into development. Product engineering deals with the quality, cost, development, design, performance, and serviceability.
Read more: Redefining FinTech in 2022
Should Companies Become More Software-centric Now?
The general opinion is - Yes. Digital competition is high, and companies need to innovate faster. The pandemic showcased what’s important to the people - convenience and connection.
But now, software has to be more data-driven. There are three main reasons
- It helps analyze customer trends for digital products
- It enables internal teams to make real-time, data-based decisions
- It ensures performance optimization by identifying gaps
Most customers, employees, and organizations should choose “software centrism.” It is essential for a 360-degree approach to improving the customer and team experience.
The truth is digital products are here to stay. Engineering innovation must focus on the post-covid changes & modernization rather than going back to the pre-pandemic era. The inevitable future is where companies end up creating better technologies and products that will create a new customer journey.
Read more: Why DevOps matters in Innovation
The new Product Engineering Approaches
Innovation will drive new revenue streams. Digital products provide multiple touchpoints for the users. A simple example is wearable gadgets. Health-conscious individuals are staying connected all day through this IoT modernization. Companies interact with customers by providing digital offerings through such devices and build a new market that has always been in its infancy.
Engineering innovative products is a result of multiple approaches. What are they?
- Culture
- With the pandemic, there has been a steady culture shift. It is seen in the general workings of every organization that is going through digitization.
- For employees, the culture is fast-paced, innovation-based. Changing market dynamics now require teams to engineer products quickly. A mindset shift is underway. The competition will drive teams to identify unique areas where digital products can deliver value.
- For organizations, a complete overhaul is in process. Engineering innovative products will come with replacing old values and focusing on creativity and empowerment. Companies must embrace changes like remote work, agile principles, and more to improve efficiency.
- Ecosystem
- The next approach is to build a data-driven ecosystem. It is crucial to modernize the data infrastructure to take full advantage of product engineering. Even the move to the cloud servers is essential for real-time decision-making.
- Product innovation arises from data that showcases valuable gaps to be filled. It also helps to use the right technologies like AI, RPA, and Cloud. Data helps with analyzing customer demands, understanding employee performance, and ensuring the organization is driving towards digitization.
- But to bring this change, the leadership needs to take charge. According to a survey, 58% of people believed the buy-in of IT leadership is crucial to building a data-driven ecosystem. The change would be challenging as companies have operated through intuition and research until now rather than data.
- Collaboration
- Last but not least, the third primary focus area is collaboration. Pods are the latest developments in product engineering collaboration. They are smaller, cross-functional teams for building customer-centric products.
- The real benefit is that pods bring talent together. Organizational silos would reduce as teams work in harmony to build singular products by utilizing multiple resources. Digital pods will enable products to be built from anywhere.
- Pods are unlike software development teams that comprise only developers and tech leads. They are a smaller group of individuals who follow the best practices to build products in their unit.
Conclusion
The pandemic is a test for product engineering capabilities. How fast can you innovate? How dynamically can you build products? What is your digitization process? Answering all these questions is important to engineer valuable and sustainable products.
Product engineering will not improve by just implementing agile or data analytics with the assistance of a software product engineering company. It is a holistic process of experience enhancement - one that comes with a 360-degree approach that comprises people, processes, technologies, culture, infrastructure, and service.
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