Digital Product Insights

We’re discovering how effective it can be when a roadmap is so strategically built that organizations place it at the center of their decision-making process and teams put it at the center of their product decisions. We’ve seen how a roadmap can bridge your work with the rest of the teams and give you control over the direction your product is taking. Below are a few tips to ensure you’re making the best use of your roadmap.

Today there is an entire generation of people who do not understand the notion of balancing a checkbook. The phrase itself has turned into an anachronism. The idea of carrying money in physical wallets made of animal hide may become absurd sooner than later. Either way, the future of payments is currently in flux, and its time you re-evaluated any techno biases you may have in a market that offers you the opportunity to embrace mobile pay, cryptocurrency and many other digital money opportunities that can make your life more streamlined and less cumbersome.

We hear about impressive achievements related to Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence every other day now. Even so, most of us are still dubious about the applicability of AI in our space, and with good reason. Take the remarkable performance of an AI-based system on a database with millions of images for instance. This won't always translate into the same rate of success “in the wild” where context, angles, lighting conditions and image resolution may be very different. When somebody performs a task well, we naturally assume that the person has some competence in related tasks. But AI systems are trained to do specific jobs, and their knowledge typically does not generalize. The most significant source of exaggerated claims and confusion regarding AI’s progress stems from a false belief that a system’s narrow understanding implies broader understanding. We are far from machines that exhibit general intelligence across diverse domains.

AI, like so many other new technologies, has generated too many unrealistic expectations. Too many organizations today liberally sprinkle references to neural networks, machine learning and other forms of the technology on their sites with little link to its actual capabilities. Merely calling a site “AI-powered,” other than maybe helping with fundraising, doesn’t make it any more effective.

Rarely does a reference have anything enlightening to tell you. Nevertheless, it’s on you to look beyond the flattering recommendations of the reference and figure out whether the vendor is able enough to do the job to your satisfaction. You will never get a poor reference from a vendor. You’ll probably get a list of vetted clients who are sure to speak highly of them. Better still is to ask the vendor for a list, with names of the last five clients they worked with. Sure, they can still slightly manipulate the list, but this way at least, you'll get a more balanced understanding of the company’s recent work.

This was never an individual journey. The success of your company is a reflection of the total value of your team. Often, the hiring process is not adequately prioritized and moreover, outsourced to external recruiters and yours might not be the priority cause they likely already have enough clients to cater to. I'm sure you understand how important it is to hire great people from the beginning. Use your personal network of friends and colleagues, and take the time out to scout strategically through professional networking sites like Linkedin, to find good engineers who will contribute to your company’s success.

While collectively, these three cloud providers dominate the space, their approach to cloud computing is dictated strongly by their background. Amazon has immense know-how when it comes to collating and aggregating massive amounts of data, Google’s heritage stems from an analytical background, and Microsoft’s strength comes from computing. This comparison will underline their strengths and weaknesses. As we proceed, tie these activities to your business objectives to find the right fit. Also, it’s important to note that your best fit may not turn out to be a single cloud provider.

Connected cars are evolving. Vehicle-centric IoT services such as the remote-controlled heaters and digital door locks are common today. But these services are merely the stepping stones to the truly connected car. After Internet of Things (IoT), connected cars seems to be the next most talked about topic in the industry. From automobile manufacturers to telecom operators to software vendors to consumer electronics companies, everyone is excited about the connected vehicle phenomenon. Contemporary cars, with the power of twenty modern PCs, already pack more punch than any other computing device. They have more than 100 million lines of code that can process up to 25GB of data in an hour. Keeping aside the hype created by the industry players, connected cars do bring a lot of value to the table.

It can seem counterintuitive to scout for an outside team of consultants after putting in all that effort to hire a skilled team of software engineers. However, in today’s market, it isn’t enough to be the first-to-market, you also have to be the best-to-market. To help you get there, it’s become increasingly common for companies of all sizes to seek out expertise from dedicated consultants.

Hiring a VP of Engineering who can take your product to the next level isn’t going to be easy. If you’re new to the market, your team is most likely a close-knit, hardcore lot of developers led by a couple of seasoned founders, and they aren’t going to let just anyone lead the technology organization. Or maybe your company’s model is too engineering-focused and still relatively new and untested. Engineering is, of course, one of the most critical functions at a tech company. In fact, as every company becomes a tech company in some form, it’s vital to every company. And while potentially, there are enough leaders in the technical product function, from architects to CTOs, the VP or head of engineering is the executive that grows and manages the engineering team, responsible for ascertaining the time it will take to deliver products or features, and delivering quality releases on schedule.

To validate our API response and persistent data, we’ve been making use of JSON schema. It’s helped us bring order to our database and saved us a whole lot of time. JSON, an uncomplicated data interchange format, stands for “JavaScript Object Notation.” It started as a notation for the world wide web. Since JSON is based on JavaScript and JavaScript exists in most web browsers, it’s effortless to support there. However, it has proved to be simple enough and useful enough that it is now used in many other instances that go beyond web surfing.

In the field of outsourcing particularly, a well-planned pricing model is an essential component of a successful long-term cooperation. Here, when it comes to economic evaluation, flexibility will prove to be a crucial mechanism. But sadly, pricing is perhaps one of the few aspects of outsourcing where innovation and evolution weren’t as fast as in the case of growth of technologies.

It's fast becoming evident that the blockchain technology is about a lot more than just Bitcoin. Across many sectors like healthcare, finance, government, media and more, innovative applications are cropping up every day. The blockchain technology is going up against technology that’s ripe for replacement and decades-old, by being tested in a whole lot of ways. Let’s take a look at how it’s influencing the agriculture industry.

In the beginning, the internet worked with intangibles. You corresponded on forums, sent or got emails, read and distributed articles. Today, the internet works with assets. These assets are encoded and stored on a network-to-network link known as the ledger or blockchain, where every participant can keep an eye on the people they do business with. This goes beyond preventing theft and protecting your business dealings. This also quickens the process, simplifies your affairs, reduces errors, and saves you the need of hiring a third party.

The rift between design and development is the rift between two different ways of solving problems, within given constraints. The design team aims to accommodate a vast number of factors including visual appeal, accessibility, usability, and context within a single solution so that the most substantial number of users will feel at home with the product. The development team aims to direct the complication and subtlety of the algorithm to the same set of users so that they can use it as effectively and efficiently as possible.