- Customer centricity: Customer-centric product development would not just let the revenue flow but also provide several leap-frogging opportunities. However, enterprises need to recognize and prioritize the ‘end customers’ and the ‘product and engineering’ community developing those products. The latter’s productivity will be a critical focus area for enterprises as they invest in custom building and adopting open-source platforms and products. A strong enterprise focus on enhancing the skills and toolsets of that community would be non-negotiable. Data and insights would play a crucial role in every single decision making.
- Comprehensive perspective of platforms: Organizations need an enterprise architecture framework that adopts a holistic view of the platforms and products. Platforms will be critical to a company’s success as companies heavily invest in building scalable platforms throughout the tech value chain. A platform’s ability to expose open APIs for the business-facing products would make them invaluable, creating future possibilities. While the business-facing products can deliver an enriching customer experience leveraging the platform capabilities, the platform teams can continue to innovate under the hood.
- Maximizing operational efficiency: Product rollout gets quite complex in a multi-site, people-heavy business (like big-box retail with a vast supply chain). Moreover, if the product/application is not intuitive enough, the staff—both trained and untrained—may just stop using it. Hence, the mindset while building those products and applications should be centered around operational efficiency. Product adoption, error reporting, ease of use and business KPIs are foundational for strong business continuity and exponential growth. Likewise, event monitoring and operation tracking of the system’s business and technical health is vital for improving workforce productivity. Here, canary deployment and observability patterns— till the edge systems — would play a crucial role in experimenting, learning and rolling out robust solutions.
- Physical labs: Future will see enterprises construct compact, full-fledged labs at numerous sites to inspire iterative and transformative innovation skills. These labs will fully imitate a natural business environment. Physical labs that implement production-like network rules will enable technical and business teams to collaborate on real-world production pilots, maximizing the likelihood of providing something valuable to customers and the company. These labs would also provide swift test-and-learn capabilities for companies wishing to collaborate with start-ups.
- Smart edges: Thanks to lower-cost commodity hardware, IoT devices and so forth, edge systems are more innovative than ever. Businesses investing in smart edge systems will stay ahead of the curve. These new intelligent systems can have an event-driven, reactive design. Such systems, though geographically dispersed, will be supported centrally via the events and telemetry pipelines, resulting in the highest operational efficiency.
- Democratized product intelligence: We all know that it becomes a retailer/manufacturer’s job to incorporate and manage theft prevention systems like video analytics, smart tags, alarm systems, etc., for high-value products. Yet the future will see more uptick toward democratized models. For instance, a product shoplifted from the nearest store will be useless unless a checkout transaction happens at the Point-of-Sale counter. Product and manufacturing outfits need to devise newer protocols, intelligent chips, etc., that revolutionize electronic and mechanical product segments.
As businesses prepare for the next evolution, the engineering community will adopt more open-source projects, primarily through well-supported networks like Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Likewise, product managers specializing in gauging the value of a function/feature of a product will have plenty of opportunities to further their careers. Engineers adept at learning changing technologies, hands-on with engineering tools and platforms and who go deeper instead of using frameworks will remain ‘in-demand.’
It is the best time to work in the realm of technology and harness it to create future possibilities for businesses.
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