Accelerating Time-to-Market: The Ready-to-Ship Approach
When it comes to software, whether it’s custom or off the shelf, one of the things that matter if you want to be successful is the speed with which you develop it and bring it to market. The rise of no-code/low-code tools and even AI-powered solutions means competition is fiercer than ever. And the days when simply having a talented team of software developers guaranteed the success of your solution are long gone.
But how can businesses big or small get their products to market faster without sacrificing quality or their budget?
One approach that has gained traction in recent years is the “Ready-to-Ship” approach, which focuses on streamlining development processes to accelerate time-to-market for software products.
The Ready-to-Ship approach
The traditional approach to software development often involves lengthy development cycles, extensive testing phases, and rigid release schedules. But this way of doing things oftentimes ends up hindering rather than facilitating success.
This is where ready-to-ship can help.
At its core, ready-to-ship emphasizes the importance of delivering incremental updates and improvements to your software solution as soon as they are ready. Rather than waiting for a lengthy development cycle to be completed before releasing a product, developers work in smaller, more manageable iterations, continuously refining and enhancing the software based on user feedback and market trends.
For example, let’s say you are building a fitness app. Rather than spending months developing a fully-fledged product you decide to initially start by including some core workout routines and a user-friendly interface for logging exercises. This way you not only test the feasibility of your idea but can get feedback faster from your potential customers and make changes easier.
Shortening development cycles
One of the key benefits of adopting a ready-to-ship approach is the ability to significantly shorten development cycles. By breaking down projects into smaller, more manageable tasks (or sprints as they’re known in IT) you focus on delivering value incrementally.
As a result, your development teams can reduce the time it takes to bring your software product to market. This allows your organization to respond quicker to changing market conditions and customer needs, giving you a potential competitive edge.
Let’s go back to our fitness app example and go for a 2-week sprint. You could set a goal with your software development team or software development partner that in each 2 sprints you implement a new type of workout. After you’ve implemented 3 or 4 new workouts maybe you want to assess the feasibility of including some gamification or social sharing options in your software.
In a traditional approach, all of these would need to be decided beforehand and implemented, but a ready-to-ship approach focuses on incremental releases that allow you to more easily respond to user needs and market trends. Which leads us to our third and final point.
Respond more easily to market trends
Another key advantage of the ready-to-ship approach is its ability to enhance your market responsiveness. By continuously gathering feedback from customers and iterating on products in real-time, you can ensure that your software is meeting the needs of your target audience effectively.
This proactive approach to product development allows you to stay ahead of the curve, anticipating trends and addressing customer pain points before they become widespread issues.
Yet there are some things you need to keep in mind when embarking on such an approach – there are some risks that you need to be prepared for. Any potential release of a new feature could negatively impact your software solution. You finished your gamification function and pushed it to production but you discover that users aren’t able to log in their workouts anymore. What do you do?
In order to avoid these types of situations you need to talk to your software development partner or in-house team and use some form of version control systems that allow your developers to track changes and revert to previous versions if necessary. And also put together a rollback strategy to ensure a smooth transition in case an update introduces unforeseen issues. We’ll cover this topic in more detail in a future blogpost.
Is the Ready-to-Ship approach right for me?
Adopting a ready-to-ship approach can be a game-changer for companies looking to accelerate time-to-market for their software products. But to succeed at implementing this type of approach you need an experienced software development partner in your corner. We’ve helped companies of all sizes overcome their software challenges and achieve their goals. Discover how we’ve helped our current clients succeed.