Product Development

I just woke up and I am dead hungry! I have already eaten about six times today. It seems I get hungry almost every 3 hours due to the diet. It’s a good thing there are plenty of tuna stocked in the house ^^.

In a totally unrelated note, I used to think that product development is something that a developer should fear since I have this notion that most product development activities are just actually maintenance — making you do the same thing over and over again leaving no room for growth in terms of technical know-how. I now realize that this is not always the case. It actually depends on the product itself. If the product is something that is customized depending on the client’s needs, then it will cover most engineering lifecycle with a larger possibility of incorporating new designs and technologies. Otherwise if it is just non-changing product, containing only a few enhancements every release, then you are in the road to maintaining a product — which I hate ^^.

And if you are in a product development business wherein the product is customized on a client basis, then you can further expand your business to give support and maintenance services — obviously. Another room for business expansion is staff augmentation of developers or consultancy as some call it. Since the company will never run out of “products” to create, it can rotate its resources to product development and staff augmentation. This has several benefits that will include:

• No idle resources. You will always have a project for your resource to tinker with.
• Resource rotation. Developers always get bored when he deals with the same design and technology. By rotating them to the different client of your products or deploying them as consultants, you will expose them to different development experiences and challenges thereby reducing the risk of them getting bored.
• Free training grounds. The established product could be a training ground for fresh bloods since it would definitely have a defined process and solid documentation. Plus the predictability of risks and the expertise in estimations for the product should already be rock solid.
• Steady income. Since you have a product with I assume a number of devoted clients, then you are in for a steady income.
• Established expertise. If the product focuses on a technology, say for example, Java, then you can also establish your expertise on the said technology and then using it to “sell” your developers as consultants.

I know there are a lot more into this business scheme and probably some disadvantages too but I am already sleepy so maybe I’ll just explore this some more on a future blog ^^.