Optimizing the Application Development Delivery Pipeline to Deliver Customer Value

3 strategies software development organizations can hone in on when trying to optimize their ability to modify their base product for a customer.

1.) Keep the base product thin with heavily used features and functionality. A product will evolve over time with new features and functionality. This is a fact. A minimum viable product (MVP) that does not evolve is not the long term answer either. The base product will need to grow and mature to be successful. Market research trends by product management and customer demand will help shape the base product offering. However, be careful to not bloat the base product with configurable functionality that is not being used heavily by your customers. Why? It will get in the way of future custom development or future extensions customers will want to make to their version of the application software they purchased. It will over time slow down your ability to innovate the base product offering and even slow down the custom development delivery pipeline. Configurations are great for products, and feature flags that turn validated functionality on/off (at will) is absolutely efficient. However, too much configuration becomes counter productive when trying to optimize the delivery of custom functionality for a customer. Add configurations when and where appropriate. The side effects of cyclomatic complexity will add up real quick!

2.) Monitor and analyze functionality usage by end users. This ties into a thin product strategy and is the rationale behind underlining the word "used" above. During the procurement and proposal processes (that software provider vendors participate in), generalizations and assumptions will likely be made about what the end users will actually end up using in the application. Decisions will be made on what to build based on what the customer wants up front. Do not let that be the only source of information for determining future base product needs. Educate the customer on how their end users are actually interfacing with the software. An end user's interaction and satisfaction with the features of the application is much more valuable and in touch with the reality of how the software is being used to solve meaningful business problems. Would you want to keep building out customer specific functionality for feature 3 below? Collect and analyze that #Data!

3.) Build a development culture that embraces problem solving and deep analysis. Software development vendors are contracted to provide services that help their customers solve meaningful business problems. The key to providing high customer value is solving the right problem the right way. Effective problem solving that customers are looking for takes time and requires analysis. It requires the ability to look beyond the obvious, suggest new ideas to problems (which at first could seem like the ideal solution), but still having the restraint to not accept the initial status quo. Easier said than done, of course! But a key thing to remember in software is that not all solutions should involve just fixing a bug. Sometimes the hardest problems to solve will involve deep analysis, dissecting processes and optimizing user workflows. Encourage your development teams to live and breathe problem solving and analysis. It is really at the heart of providing true customer value.