In the fast changing technology landscape, the organizations have to continually evaluate their product and reinvent periodically to keep their offerings competitive to the changing business demands. As part of their reinvention efforts, they have to add new features to support customer base, revamping the product architecture to scale it up etc. This may include – UI/UX initiatives, mobile centricity, and intuitive changes to the workflows.
Product Modernization is an essential strategy in which product features or product design or both are modified to suit the latest current trends / demand and is re-launched frequently from time to time.
Ignoring product modernization has far-reaching repercussions.
By relying on your outdated systems and software, you are exposing your business to risk. Product modernization in itself is a cost-intensive and time-intensive exercise, but its benefits far outweigh than retaining a legacy product. Though there are many areas within the scope of product modernization, here we are going to discuss some of the most important and obvious choices.
A. UI/UX & Accessibility
The latest trends of UI/UX are changing at a breakneck speed and systems are becoming obsolete at a faster rate than before. You are long past the glory days of .NET and today you are treading the era of modern JavaScript frameworks like ReactJS and AngularJS. Single-page applications are increasingly becoming the norm of the day and they owe their high loading speed to these modern frameworks. This is also the reason why most of today’s application doesn’t take much time to reload as they only send the information to the server in bits and not the entire lot. If you talk about accessibility, it also is undergoing a rapid makeover. Today the modern browsers have the capability to let a person read the content of the website without leaving the website.
B. Technical Architecture
Take a glance at your current format of data and you would realize how different it looked from the way it used to be in the past. You will also realize the technology stack which was adept at processing the old data is fast becoming outdated. Your technical architecture is no longer the traditional client-server setup. It has now become important to move the business logic from the data layer to the middle layer which better understands the contemporary architecture. For an example, migrating to cloud from a legacy system is not enough. Google and Amazon are upgrading their cloud services on a regular basis and you want to keep up the pace you will need to upgrade your products regularly to fully take advantage of these modernization.
C. Automation
To keep your business competitive you must have a modern outlook towards your product. Only then you can offer competitive prices and stay relevant in tough market conditions. If your process has steps that can be easily automated then you must take on the product modernization path. In today’s agile methodology driven development era, it is a prerequisite to automate modern applications.
For example to answer preliminary questions and FAQs on your product marketing site, you may use a chatbot to do all the talking. But once the visitor graduates to more complex queries, the staff can intervene and lead the conversation.
D. Third Party Integrations
There are always going to be third party tools (HubSpot, Salesforce, QuickBooks) that form an integral part of any business strategy as well as the core system. But the real question is whether your current Third Party Integrations includes all the current popular applications. If the answer is ‘No’, it impedes your business growth and it is only a matter of time before you start losing business to your competition.
A popular chat and team collaboration tool Slack is a good example. Today’s modern teams prefer to converse and coordinate for their projects over Slack rather than the conventional information sharing platform. A word of caution only if your product has need of such tool, then Slack should definitely be in your list of integrations.
Two common approaches to product modernization.
- The layered approach
This approach is preferred where there is an integrated architecture, and multiple features are bundled together in the same product. The modernization happens in one tier at a time in an n-tier application, either starting from the UI layer, moving to the service or middle-tier and ending with the ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) and Database layers.
As the name suggests, it is implemented in a layer by layer approach. For example, the product can be modified starting from the UI layer and then moving to the service or middle layer and then end the ORM and DB layers. The implementation can also be taken in a reverse direction, i.e., starting from the DB layer and ending at the UI layer and in some rare cases, modernization can be implemented in just the middle layer. This is a scenario where there is no requirement to rewrite the existing code in the top and bottom layers. In some of our projects, we have carried out a layered approach to product modernization.
- The vertical approach
This approach is taken up if only a few of the modules/features are required to address. The new features are implemented in every subsequent releases periodically. Here, all the layers connected to the feature are migrated to the latest design. Now you may have a pretty decent home-grown login system which only requires signing on using user’s Google account or Facebook account credentials. But if you take it further to the next level where the user can login using a Single Sign-On module (SSO). This would be a product modernization exercise undertaken using vertical approach.
Conclusion
Most of the organizations are concerned with their top line, bottom line, and ensuring that they are digitally ahead of their competition. Having said this, a challenging job to maintain the current product, existing customer base, and access to the codes while disrupting the team’s skillsets, their work process to find the right technological balance is nothing less than a walk on fire. This is where a technology partner like Ace can help you. We have acquired the requisite proven experience in implementing product modernization projects over the years and can easily deliver benefits to end clients without disrupting the current systems and processes.
