Leading A Project Toward A Successful Production Grade Level Software

Taking a software project to be a successful product is not trivial, It has a lot of unknown factors with an unexpected result.

Some of the factors can be controlled and monitor with an experienced team.

The success of the product depends on many areas from the user's behavior to technical implementation.

Each project should have a team that has what it takes to bring the product to the users.

In order to be able to produce a successful software product, a couple of roles are needed:

• The role of the product manager 

• The role of the tech lead

• The role of the marketing manager 

• The role of sells manager 

• The role of customer success 

• The role of the DevOps 

• The role of the business development 

• The role of the R&D team

So we finally did a successful POC demo.

Now we have few options:

1. one is to deploy it to production with the POC architecture and to rely on the users as our first testers and meanwhile support new features and bug fixes that the users rising. The CEO saw it and now is asking to start the way to production and deploying the new product to the world.

2. Another option is to do updated market research and redefine the requirements and the design according to the new market analysis, this we can choose which approach to prefer.

If after the analysis we discover that the users that will be expected to use this product can increase dramatically in a short time – then we should consider designing the software to be as much as flexible as possible which will need experienced software engineers that will prevent a bottle necks of the software.

If we don’t have the ability to do a high probability analysis of the expected users, then we should define the amount of time we want to invest in taking the POC product to production.

If we will invest too much time and after the deployment, there are only several users that are using the product, since the competition release before us, we just wasted our company capital and it may cause our company finance difficulty.

On the other hand,

If we just deploy the POC code as-is and we will have a high users demand then it probably will cause performance issues that will give our company bad feedbacks and as a result lost user trust.

The software development world is not like building buildings or roads, it’s a dynamic and fast-changing environment, the experienced software leader will able to choose the right strategy to develop a successful software product.