Market Readiness is important because that’s what makes business sense and that is the thing if overlooked can adversely effect your product’s marketability
Market Readiness is not about Marketing your product but shaping your product to be Marketable.
Thousands of products are being developed in parallel across the world addressing specific niches the product owners have envisioned. Not all reach to the Market, and even when they reach many fail for they were never addressing what the market wants
How can we build products that address a need and focus all our efforts in building the features that matter and less on the fat and fancy?
Here is a primer to this whole philosophy that we wish to bring forward.
Concept Analysis
When Ideas or concept is born it is often analyzed to see if it is feasible, even if it is not done always in a structured process often you tally it with economic, technical and operational feasibility. Once found viable you either look for funding or start burning your reserves building it. The Analysis you did is most often never done later in the products life cycle as the cost and time does not justify it. We believe that the Concept Analysis Should be an ongoing process, which can be done very cost and time effectively where you slowly build the Concept to Market case and the product evolves along with it.
Social Feature Box
What should you build determines on a few factors including your understanding of the specific product terrain, your technical ability, you understanding of the competition space, your thorough knowledge of the Concept and its Marketability. All these are important but what is often missed is that you never have or rely on real time data that can shape your products evolution and improve its marketability and helps you to prioritize on what is marketable rather than what can be built. The Social Feature Box is a concept that brings user groups, Social Media and existing customer and prospect base to help you evolve the product and reduce its failure rate accounting to market disconnect
Agility
Your solution for Market Ready Software products is the Agile Model, there is no other way to shrink release time and reduce cost. Do it onshore, offshore, a mix of both, your choice but the process need to be agile
Test Coverage
Invest Time and effort to test your application. Find a cost effective proposition, as the more you test the more covered you are. Introducing testing and test management much early in your product life cycle, understand your user scenarios, connect your test bench to your requirements list, build traceability through out your product development
Reduce Costs
Reduce Costs in a intelligent manner. Weigh your possibilities between cost, time and other constraints that will stop you
Prototyping
Based on the size of your product, explore the possibility of workable prototyping that can also involve reusable efforts
Document
No need for pages and pages of running commentary on what you are doing, but document through feature lists, priority lists, competitive data lists, and Requirements lists in technically readable formats like spreadsheets. Have a process for the lists to evolve in real time feeding the development and testing cycles. Profile your application before it is made
Choose your Technology Wisely
Select technology based on scalability, popularity and ease of building. Understand that not just people but products also need to collaborate. Decide if you need to build from scratch or can you use stuff to save time on reinvention. Addressing a business need is always not the invention of a new technology, but the innovative use of an existing technology
Categories: Management, Marketing, Tech & Marketing, Technology
Vinod Narayan 
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