Cloud-based Product Development – What Startup Founders Need to Know

The journey of any software product needs to be driven by how the market responds. This is especially important for startups, who are just beginning their journey in the extremely crowded and competitive product development market. Keeping your product development agile enough to continuously accommodate evolving trends, demand fluctuations, and customer feedback is extremely important if you want to make it big – and that’s where cloud-based product development can help. Read on to uncover the ins and outs of cloud-based product development.

As a startup founder, one of your biggest concerns will surely be around how you will set your product development ball rolling. Given the volatility of the market and the level of competition, establishing a strong foothold is critical to long-term survival. But using traditional, on-premise tools and technologies to build products can lead to a difficult start.

If you find yourself constantly hitting roadblocks trying to drive change, struggling to implement product development best practices, or find yourself wasting a lot of time resolving issues, what you need is to embrace the cloud to drive quick, scalable, and agile software development.

Cloud-based product development can enable you to foster improved collaboration between teams, establish agile processes, and support faster product development cycles. By bringing all moving parts of the product development lifecycle in a centralized location, you can empower your teams to develop new products with agility, while also acting sooner to fix errors and issues. In addition, it can help you to rapidly adopt new capabilities, quickly test and scale winning ideas, and minimize the probability and cost of failure.

Here’s what you need to know about cloud-based product development:

1. Have the required budget in place: Aspiring to enable cloud-based development is one thing; achieving success with it is a totally different ball game. If you want your cloud-based product development efforts to drive the intended results, you need to have the required funding in place. Before you begin your journey, make sure to carry out a simple cost-benefit analysis to pit your cloud investments against the benefits you will reap.
2. Don’t succumb to the pressure of embracing everything cloud: If you are embarking on the cloud-based product development journey, it is natural for you to want to embrace cloud for every single activity. But not everything you do needs to be cloud-enabled. Instead of succumbing to the pressure of cloudifying everything, identify tasks or processes that will benefit the most from cloud – and accordingly build your cloud strategy and choose your cloud models
3. Make sure to future-proof your workflows and processes: As your business grows, scaling it to meet the demands of your audience will become inevitable. To ensure your business is capable to scale up or down – depending on the demand – you need to establish workflows and processes that support such scalability. Future-proofing them during the initial stages of development can set a strong foundation of scalability from the beginning.
4. Invest in cloud-based remote collaboration tools: Investing in cloud-based remote collaboration tools can be a real game-changer for your budding business. Such tools can not only enable teams to connect and interact with each other; they can also work on tasks in real-time while constantly tracking project progress, working together on issues, and driving successful development outcomes.
5. Despite the redundancy cloud offers, establish a strong DR strategy: Outages are not just limited to on-premise environments; they are just as likely to occur in a cloud environment as well, so it’s important to establish a strong DR strategy. Such a strategy can ensure your product development teams can continue to drive efforts in developing the product – without being impacted by a server outage or system downtime.
6. Engage with a qualified cloud partner to maximize your outcomes: Although you can train your in-house development team on cloud tools and processes, engaging with a qualified partner can drive far better outcomes. A partner can not only make you well-versed with cloud best practices but also provide the right guidance and recommendations to overcome challenges and bottlenecks in time – so you can focus on growing your business.

If you want your growing business to be rewarded with high-quality software products, low operational cost, shorter development cycles, consistent deployment of working code, and a high degree of reusability, embracing cloud-based product development is a great way to achieve all this, and more. Contact us today and allow us to build your digital product!