Digital Product Engineering Spurs Business Ecosystem

Enterprise giants across all verticals are increasingly facing disruptive forces from digital-ready firms who better meet customer needs by delivering smart digital products and services. Leadership teams thus have begun to realize the importance of speeding up the digital transformation of their organizations and introducing digital product strategy to the core of their industry-specific business models. Most digital laggard organizations are successfully launching digital products through digital product engineering and are continuously gaining a sumptuous market share through partnering with or investing in a range of digital product and services agencies that specialise in the end-to-end strategy of a product or service, including design, development, and go-to-market mechanism. These specialised firms own capabilities in advanced digital technologies such as Data Analytics, AI/ML, IoT, AR/VR, etc to develop disruptive and meaningful products and services with simplified experiences on cloud-enabled intelligent applications, as well as can transform product development infrastructure into more digitally advanced and data-driven application development platforms.

SA's expertise in digital product engineering realises that large technology enterprises will continue to invest in specialised firms to accelerate the modernization of their digital infrastructure for product launch and development process and propel it across their capabilities for developing market-relevant, smart, and connected products and respective support services. Increasing number of technology firms are now converging their technology advancements and innovating new business models, and have entered into non-core product territory. Realizing the exponential value in digital product engineering investment from the examples set by the tech firms, large and mid-size enterprises of various industries are following suit and learning from cross-industry use cases to acquire digital technology capabilities and digitize their core products in an inorganic accelerated manner.

How does advancement in digital product development technology affect businesses?

New differentiated engagements address changing customer behavior and preferences

Advancement in technology Innovation has led to creating valuable experiences and products that fulfill new and emerging needs, hence increasing the loyalty of current customers and gaining new customers. Industry incumbents, with their possession of a mine of data and resources, can combine technical capabilities like Data Analytics & AI, to create relevant digital products. A range of new and differentiated products enhance engagements with customers which proportionately increases customer lifetime value.

Competitive new products introduce new revenue streams and boost profitability
Using AI & Data Analytics, firms are able to procure insights on emerging opportunities for developing entirely new products that give them a competitive edge in the continuously evolving market. With advanced digital product development platforms, new digital products are marketed at lightspeed and subsequently create new revenue channels for organizations.

Market leaders have reinstated the necessity of advancement in digital product development for business continuity with their investment in digital capabilities. Companies who are looking into enhancing their digital product development strategy should keep the below trends in mind.

Trend 1: AI and Data-Driven Product Development

Listening to data from different sources like application analytics, marketing data, customer support data, social media conversational trends, etc. can provide a broader yet analytical picture of the market trend. Using Data Analytics, firms can obtain insights on customer behavior and AI can recommend relevant product prototypes to build. An AI-driven software development and maintenance platform can advance the product development process by automating certain feature development in a digital product as well as can drive the possibility of altering user experiences of products and services according to consumer preference dynamics in real-time.

Trend 2: Digital product engineering strengthens the digital ecosystem

Experience of a digital product has the potential of extending into multiple functions and channels. By building intelligent APIs, digital product development platforms expedite interaction of digital applications with computers, mobile, and IoT-driven devices to such extent that an end-to-end digital journey around touchpoints for completing one particular task has become seamless. To ensure a smooth end-user experience, several stakeholders comprising tech giants, industry incumbents, and digital boutique firms have built a digital business ecosystem among themselves and increase new revenue channels and overall business valuation.

Trend 3: Security and data compliance should be a fundamental feature in every product

Protecting the data of customers and partner firms and using them following strict data privacy criteria is a crucial and painful process for product owners. Hence the data flow and processing have to be planned and controlled and product owners should create guidelines that can be implemented as a list of access control and data consumption rules on AI-powered application development platforms at the initial phase of product development cycles. It will reduce the risk of data violations and illegal access as well as data leakage and security potholes after the product launch.

The extensive proliferation of digital applications worldwide has led to faster technological advancement to predict market trends and create digital assets at unprecedented speed. Thus, we are witnessing a change in the approach to digital product engineering, across enterprises of different verticals and various sizes. Needless to say, it's an exciting time for firms to plan and execute digital growth across their product development strategy and product portfolio.