“Be Quick Or Be Dead” – No, I’m not talking about one of my favorite Iron Maiden song here.
I’m talking about building Technology Products.
The playbook for building technology products has changed completely. Agility is the name of the game.
Whether you’re a startup working out of a garage or you’re an established enterprise with 100s of employees and customers, if you don’t move fast enough, you’re going to die.
Someone, somewhere, out there is forging a bullet with your business’ name on it.
In this hyper-competitive landscape, it is nearly impossible to come up with a unique idea. The only way to be on top of the game is through relentless execution.
Product-Market Fit, time-to-market, agility, nimbleness, iteration, kaizen etc. are all valid approaches for technology products to succeed.
The truth is, product-market fit can only be achieved through rapid iteration by taking direct feedback from the marketplace.
Successful Players Move Fast
Yes, it is absolutely true! Companies like Uber, Netflix, Alibaba etc. all roll out over 100 updates a day. Yes you heard me right, a 100! How? It isn’t happenstance that they are uber-successful (no pun intended :)).
If you want to achieve product-market fit like these companies did, you have to move fast. These organizations are fundamentally structured so that they can move fast.
When you get to an ARR of $10M or over, it is even harder to move faster unless you’ve built your organization to scale that way from ground-up.
Think Different – Not a cliche
Moving fast requires a whole new way of thinking. For example, you’ll have to shift paradigms, gut old standards or even try new approaches. To help you gain a fundamental understanding, this book by 37Signals (the team behind Basecamp) is one of my favorite reads.
Absorb the useful, eliminate everything else. This whole new way of working obviously presents engineering challenges. That’s where serious modern architectures come into play.
Micro-services. Resilient/Reactive Software. Telemetry. Continuous-Integration. Continuous-Deployment. Test Driven Development. Behavior Driven Development. The list is endless…
So how do you keep up with this challenge? It starts with education. Build your skunkworks now!
At HyperTrends, we assist businesses with massively transformational technologies to spearhead their product development. Check us out if you have more questions. https://www.hypertrends.com
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn here. It has been modified and personalized with a few links exclusively for HyperTrends Blog readers.