Digital Product Insights

It seems like every other startup has added a Docker angle to their pitch. Many developers choose Rails because it allows them to be productive very quickly, but this can come with the tradeoff of dependency, frustration with version management and databases, and file size bloat. Docker helps alleviate a lot of these problems by limiting the scope of dependencies, isolating processes from one another, and allowing us to use optimized images. Of course, another layer of abstraction from your code could very well introduce problems of its own.

While the average phone in America is quite powerful, in emerging markets devices are still, in many ways, limited. Even so, the same software runs across it all. Now IoT devices, which are about five to seven years behind smartphones, have a similar trajectory, but their diversity in CPUs and platforms are even greater. Most of the devices used for IoT development are small, low powered, and have limited batteries. Lower computational power is the tradeoff here. To deliver the connectivity and form-factor needed to succeed in the IoT business, your developers have to relearn many performance-enhancing techniques, while coming to terms with the fact that the latest tools which work exceptionally well on a development machine will most probably not run well in constrained environments.

Connected technology initiatives are making waves not only at Intel, Microsoft, and SAP, but they’re also quickly finding their place in unexpected everyday places like basketball courts, farmlands, and kitchens. Before we know it, IoT will seep into every facet of our daily lives, managing our homes, tending our gardens, and even monitoring our mailboxes. Shortly, IoT products will be as ubiquitous as cell phones are today, so now’s a great time to get involved.

Elasticsearch is a powerful and flexible open source, distributed, real-time search, and analytics engine. It’s the gold standard in search technologies. It’s built on top of the Apache Lucene library and provides a robust, RESTful HTTP interface for querying and indexing massive amounts of structured data. Right out of the box, it provides efficient, scalable and robust search. A main characteristic of Elasticsearch is that it’s distributed at its core, meaning you can easily scale it horizontally for the sake of redundancy or performance.

Let me introduce you to the loop. It starts with an internal trigger (you were bored and while browsing, came across this blog) or an external trigger (an app notification). This is followed by an action in response to the trigger (you click the link or the app) and a reward (see the message or the tagged picture) for the action you performed. Now, the fourth step is critical.

Many impossibilities of yesterday are possible today. Today’s impossibilities, centered around Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) will soon become possible. You see, the impossibility isn’t whether they work, rather it's about taking them mainstream. So the real question is, how good does it have to be before the mainstream embraces it into their daily lives?

Don’t expect people to buy your product unless it is truly revolutionary. Not at first, anyway. When you start your SaaS business, you’ll soon discover that you’re just another product in the universe of fast-paced tech and innovative ideas. Starting out, not many might recognize your company’s name or what you do, so your first job is to get your name out there. There are enough methods to market a SaaS product, from affiliate partnerships and paid advertising, through content marketing and active outreach to media outlets. Experiment with a combination of these methods. Pay close attention to what works for you and know that it might change with time.

When designing for multiple platforms, the most significant challenge is balancing the consistency of functionality and branding with the conventions of individual platforms. iOS, Android, Web, and others all contain their own unique guidelines, users, and devices. Without the right balance, your app may end up hard to use or feel out of place. Additionally, the need to work concurrently often arises, even though ideally it's considered best to work on more than one platform sequentially. Below are a few pointers that have helped us through some of the challenges while we were juggling different platforms.

In theory, the Product Manager’s job is a one person job. But in practice, overseeing the development of a larger, complex product is a shared effort. The role of each product manager varies according to many dynamics. The type of company, the size of the company, the type of product, the stage the product is in, and the culture of the company all dictate the role and influence of the product manager. A PM’s daily work activities transform depending on what stage of the product development lifecycle he or she is in. Typically a PM finds himself in one of these 3 phases: Discovery, Planning or Execution.

The argument around SQL vs. NoSQL is nothing but the comparison of relational vs. non-relational databases. The difference lies in how they’re built, the kind of information they store, and how they store it. Relational databases are structured, while non-relational databases are document-oriented and distributed.

The success of your company is a reflection of the total value of your team. This was never an individual journey. However, hiring the right people is easier said than done and hasty hires who don’t fit the role impacts your ability to scale. Small businesses especially understand how one bad hire can ruin the productivity of the entire team. That’s why entrepreneurs obsess over hiring.

Today, our phones are smarter, the internet is a lot more accessible, and even our pets have connected accessories. These devices aren’t all built by prominent organizations. Most are associated with young engineers, programmers and up until now, obscurely funded start-ups. With a decent grasp of programming and equipped with the right tools, you can make your own connected device in no time.

Often, when developers are building applications, it can feel like the entire project in itself. However, once your application is developed and released on the app store, it soon becomes evident, creating the app was just the beginning of the journey. Developers are makers, who find the process of building an app exhilarating, while the joys of shipping don’t linger long. But you see, the real exciting part should be getting your application to your users who find happiness in it, and making sure they keep coming back to your app on a regular basis.

Over five years of experience and numerous projects have taught us that in today’s world, a good product idea and execution aren’t enough. To succeed, you’ll have to answer critical business questions by keeping the user in the center, through research, design, prototyping, and testing. And so, we brought in Product Design Sprints, a series of workshops based on Google Design Sprints. It’s a battle-tested process any team can use, packaged into a one-five day workshop of structured brainstorming to answer these critical questions.

There is a whole lot of options out there, leaving many confused about the best method to adopt. Should I go for net banking, credit/debit cards, the various mobile wallets offering different discounts on different sites or more likely, a combination of them? So far, people have grabbed whatever is readily available to pay for their daily bills, movie tickets, cab rides and just about everything, and here, mobile wallets seem to have scored over others. The checkbook or more correctly, the checking account used to be the springboard for banks to continue, well, banking on their relationship with users by upselling other services. But today, the fundamental platform is rapidly shifting to the mobile, from the checkbook. Meaning, tech companies can now turn into the entry point to banking in ways which were just not possible before, especially, though not only, through payments. Yet, mobile payment adoption hasn’t caught on as fast as expected.