Top 5 tips to successfully scale up your digital product development

Table of contents

• Why is scaling a challenge for most products?
• Four tips for creating a product that scales to a million users
  1. Relevance
  2. Design and Experience
  3. Distribution and Reach
  4. Ability to Scale
• Conclusion
• About [x]cube

Why is scaling a challenge for most products?

Five tips for creating a product that scales to a million users

At [x]cube LABS, we have the experience of conceiving and executing multiple digital initiatives that scaled successfully to millions of users. We have delivered these successes for a wide variety of large enterprises globally. Our practiced approach to achieving product-market fit, as well as our DevOps-driven execution processes, have been instrumental in this success. In the write-up below, we leverage our experience to offer you quick guidelines on the four key areas you need to excel at to build a product in Digital Product Development that scales to a million or more users.

1. Relevance

• Solve problems:  Your digital product or service must solve a specific, tangible problem in Digital Product Development. This is so obvious that mentioning it might seem almost frivolous, yet this fundamental point is more complex than most people think.The nature of problems that the product needs to solve, for example, changes based on the various segments within the target audience. Additionally, users evolve, and their needs and habits change. Can your product solve the same problem for a wide variety of people? Does it have the ability to adapt based on the user? Does it have the ability to evolve with the user and perhaps start solving additional problems for users over time?
• Clear triggers for use: your digital product in the Digital Product Development process should be built with clear triggers. Hence, you are clear on the frequency of use and can design the overall experience accordingly.What makes the user come to this product? What triggers bring the user to this product? What will bring them back? How often will they come back, based on these triggers? How do you associate your product with a specific problem to ensure recall? Clear answers to these questions at the outset will ensure that your digital product has the right relevance.
• Simple and easy to use: A successful app doesn’t require external help or guidance. The functionalities are simple and easy to use.
• Update regularly: Frequently updating your app shows you care about community feedback and are constantly looking to provide a better experience to your users. All these factors drive customer engagement and loyalty. An app that’s not been updated for weeks or months will likely become obsolete.

The correct answers to these questions are commonly discovered iteratively as your perspective evolves in Digital Product Development. This iterative, rapidly growing method of functioning–where you test hypotheses quickly and move forward in quick sprints–will be central to your entire product development life cycle and is a precursor to the DevOps engineering methodologies you will need to implement to achieve scale on all fronts.

The DevOps engineering practice enables you to identify wrong paths quickly. Through continuous testing, you could revise your development every two days against spending over six months in code development and then testing, only to identify glitches after months of effort.

2. Design and Experience

Having established the relevance of your digital product in the Digital Product Development process, it’s time to move forward and plan its design and experience aspects. Avoid complexity in your UX/UI by having the following points in place.

• Simplified sign-up process:  If your sign-up process is complex, you’ll lose users quickly–probably in under ten seconds! Simplify the process and make sure you are asking for a sign-up at the right juncture once the value proposition of your product or service has been conveyed clearly in Digital Product Development.
• Login with existing platforms: Make the digital product development process easy by allowing you to log in from multiple platforms like Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn in Digital Product Development.
• Launch screens: Replace the ‘loading screen’ with a well-branded image that says something about the app.
• Essential things in order: The essential features that serve the most must be correct and easy to discover and use.
• Navigation possibilities: Consider the extreme navigation possibilities as a user and consider all customer journey touchpoints while designing the wireframe. The above points are still basic hygiene. You may get the above specifics right and still mess up the overall experience. It’s essential that the design, besides being aesthetically pleasing, also focuses on serving specific user needs with minimum friction. You could follow the four steps below to use the ‘jobs to be done’ framework and stay on track.
• The job-to-be-done framework: What job does the customer want done through your product or service in Digital Product Development? The concept of JTBD revolves around this central question. It helps the developer understand that customers don’t buy products and services; they hire solutions to complete various jobs. A JTBD is not a product, service, or specific solution; it’s the higher purpose for which customers buy products, services, and solutions. Consider this: For instance, if you want to be a disruptor in the education sector, you should focus on delivering the main job an aspirant wants: learning with a validated certification. An online course is a disruptor that serves the purpose here. You must find new ways to fulfill the jobs customers need to get done. The JTBD remains constant over time; your product and service offerings and value proposition should change at strategic intervals.
  1. Define the product to be developed:  Determine the goal of the product and plan the resources in Digital Product Development. Understand all the customers’ needs in the targeted market and conceptualize the products, sub-systems, and feature sets that will address the unmet needs of the targeted customers.
  2. Design the product to perform the core functional job:  Provide your engineers and architects with a job map and the precise metrics around each feature that forms part of the product in Digital Product Development. This will ensure the risk of implementing a solution that fails to deliver the desirable outcome.
  3. Enable effective interaction with the product:  Your UI designers must understand the metrics that measure success when a customer interacts with your product in Digital Product Development. They must determine the interface objects, the actions enabled by those objects, the link between objects, triggering actions, and the desired outcomes.
• Managing Cognitive Load:  Any UX design has some cognitive load for the customer to explore the product in Digital Product Development. Considering the bounded capacity of the working memory, your UX designer should maintain the mental load of the product below the safe threshold. If you expose your customers to too much information in a chaotic way, they may miss out on the main features and quit using your product. Cognitive load may be attributed to any of the following:|
  1. Irrelevant actions: Every user is motivated to achieve their objective. Making them complete unnecessary steps and tasks is wasting their time.
  2. Too much content: Bombarding your users a lot of information at a time makes it difficult for them to comprehend and analyze, resulting in a loss of interest.
  3. Too many choices: Even though it sounds good to offer users various options, too many options can cause indecisiveness.
  4. Lack of clarity: The lack of a simple, concise, and straightforward interface adds to the complexity and wastes the customer’s time.
• Context Awareness:  Context awareness can dramatically improve the user experience in Digital Product Development. It’s about figuring out what users need and designing the best interface. A context-aware product is a product that can learn what a user would need in a particular situation and provide it to them. For example, a person with an operative loan account would want quick access to his loan statement rather than having to scroll down and find it listed with options that he doesn’t use as frequently. Features such as being able to continue from where the user left last time and learning and adapting to a user’s habits and usage patterns over time should come without needing to be mentioned.

The quality of the product creation process also impacts the user’s overall experience in scaling digital product development. With a high level of complexity involved in your process, you are adopting some of the best practices, such as DevOps, which fosters a culture of collaboration to combine all the efforts into a seamless process and get your product off to a great start. Besides, it helps you evaluate design and experience promptly. Here’s how you can merge UX in the DevOps Lifecycle.

1. Understand your users. Formalize a process for creating a customer journey and identify different personas. Using these journey maps, you can create scripts for synthetic monitoring that simulate user behavior. If any issue is found, development teams can promptly resolve it before end users discover it.

2. Measure what matters—having understood your users well, and how they journey through your app, you’ll know strictly which metrics to measure are linked with UX.

3. Monitor the UX. Like any other DevOps practice, monitoring should be continuous and proactive and trigger alerts to the DevOps teams if problems occur.

4. Collect Data. The DevOps capability allows you to trace transactions end to end. This means your DevOps team can collect the data required to set benchmarks and recognize trends over time.

We’ll now talk about the software development life cycle and how to break it into three stages. Maintaining a quality SDLC would enable you to generate quality output.

• • Development: In Digital Product Development, lay out the product’s structure and consider its functionalities, utility, and reliability. From the CX perspective, produce a design that buyers would like. Also, focus on the accessibility and pleasure of using the product. Suppose you want to scale your product organically in Digital Product Development.

    In that case, your core functionalities should be flawless, and the UX/UI should be designed with the customer journey points in mind. You could adopt practices such as source code management, automated static code analysis, and implementation of CI in Digital Product Development. These will help you make your development process quick and effective in Digital Product Development.

• Testing: In Digital Product Development, automation identifies and fixes bugs. Automated testing applies to developing segregated functionalities, POC, prototypes, and integrated products. Recommended testing areas and categories in Digital Product Development include unit, performance, web, and service testing.

  Adopting code coverage techniques further strengthens continuous testing in Digital Product Development. Vulnerability scans should be mandated while testing in Digital Product Development. Applying practices like Pen Testing on your application helps find security vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. The primary goal of a pen test in Digital Product Development is to identify weak spots in your product and to measure its compliance with its security policy.

• Release & Deployment: The development teams must automate the merging and testing of code. Artifacts produced from CI systems should be inputs for release processes to run frequent deployments. Automated release processes consume these artifacts to release new versions and fixes to existing systems. If you use GitLab, on committing a code, the file gets pushed into an internal repository. The backend could be packaged as a zip file or a docker file—the front moderates .apk for the front end, which could be downloaded from your internal app store. Deploy and test in multiple environments to ascertain the quality of your product.
• Monitoring & Maintenance: In Digital Product Development, to ensure the optimum performance of your product, adopt a continuous improvement framework that performs metrics-based monitoring. This constant monitoring applies to deployment and post-deployment in Digital Product Development. For every service, aggregate logs in Digital Product Development. If anything goes wrong, you can check the dashboard for logs in Digital Product Development. You can also set alarms for specific cases that require attention due to a potential fault in Digital Product Development. Establish a centralized knowledge repository that keeps track of incidents for later referencing in Digital Product Development.

Tools used during SDLC

Tools commonly used over the software development life cycle.

3. Distribution and Reach

You’ve now reached the moment you’ve been building up to. Your product is now ready to be unveiled. We suggest you have the following checklist in place to have a successful launch, for being a little cautious in the beginning can give your product the positive start it needs. As a leading digital product development company, we understand the significance of a well-executed launch strategy.

• Launch an MVP and collect early feedback from a wide range of users
• Make changes based on the feedback collected from the prelaunch to make your product better
• Roll out the marketing and communications plan. You can’t scale to a million users without a promotional strategy.
• Promote your product through influencer marketing, staggered rollout, and every possible way that builds constructive hype.
• Use automated tools for information on important metrics that help assess the campaign.
• Keep the engagement active through social media by changing your conversion goals or distributing creative assets.
• Analyzing crucial key performance indicators related to your launch campaign to make your next product launch even more effective

What’s interesting to note here is that DevOps compliments your launch process by facilitating a seamless and reliable soft launch for every update.

4. Ability to Scale

To reach more and more users, you could continue marketing your product. But often, what’s not considered in this process is whether the infrastructure can support the increasing load. As your infrastructure crosses a specific load limit, the existing users experience poor performance, low response time, slower loading, and worst- app crashes. Ensuring that your digital product development company plans for scalability from the outset is crucial to avoid these issues and maintain a seamless user experience as your user base grows.

The pursuit of acquiring new users could cost you the loss of the existing ones if the infrastructure can’t scale up with your app. That’s only one type of scaling requirement. As you work around your product, you will come across various scaling needs and want to assess your ability to scale.

Scaling could refer to increasing or decreasing any parameter based on your needs. The most common needs that demand scaling include the following.

• User acquisition: you want to acquire new users and increase your user base, but is your existing infrastructure poised to support the load?
• New features: You launch with the most basic features but eventually add new features to retain users and compete in the market. How does it affect the functioning of other features and the overall performance?
• Uptime: With more active users accessing your application, you would want to maintain a high uptime by cutting down on maintenance downtime or downtime due to unforeseen circumstances. How do you configure to maintain a high uptime?
• Data analytics: With bulk data pouring in, which data do you need to store, what analytics tools are required, and how do you filter it out? The scaling up would require more storage, new technologies, and data mining.
• Bandwidth: Depending on your peak load and low load times, you could use your bandwidth to save resources. How conveniently can you make that change?

Your scaling-up needs could include many more parameters, such as sessions, engagement efforts, development roadmap, etc. Have a self-assessment ready to know the possible areas that may need attention should there be a requirement for scaling up or down.

5. Continuous Improvement: Implement a culture of continuous improvement throughout the digital product development lifecycle. Encourage teams within the digital product development company to regularly evaluate and optimize processes, technologies, and strategies to drive efficiency, innovation, and scalability. Embrace agile methodologies, DevOps practices, and automation tools to foster collaboration, accelerate time-to-market, and deliver customer value faster. Organizations can adapt to changing market dynamics by prioritizing continuous improvement, staying ahead of competitors, and effectively scaling their digital product development efforts.

Conclusion

Practicing DevOps in Digital Product Development Services has another advantage: it provides auto-scaling that allows your application always to have the compute capacity needed and eliminates the need to monitor server capacity manually in Digital Product Development. Auto-scaling could be done based on incoming requests, the number of jobs in the queue, and how long jobs have been in digital product development.

Creating a product in Digital Product Development Services that has the potential to scale to a million users could be enormous and complex, with challenges occurring at every stage of Digital Product Development. Partnering with a DevOps service provider is a great way to equip yourself to overcome those challenges in Digital Product Development. You’re already more than halfway to your aspiration by leveraging the abovementioned guidelines in Digital Product Development.

About [x]cube

[x]cube LABS, a division of PurpleTalk Inc., is a leader in digital innovation and strategy consulting. Established in 2008, we are born digital with deep expertise in all things digital – Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, wearables & IoT. We have delivered over 700 solutions across industries with the DevOps philosophy, won 25+ International awards, worked with 500+ clients & created value of over $2.0 bn for our clients. Being one of the earliest adopters, we have developed expertise in implementing DevOps. [x]cube is also one of the first 12 agencies globally approved by Google as a Certified Developer Partner.