Whilst technical debt and innovation take place side by side, there are other sources of challenges to consider in order to achieve good product management. You might wish to deliver new things to your clients while the developers wish to design new features. The QA section might be all pepped to test the new specifications, and the marketing and sales team are all pumped up to speak about the new features in their promotional campaign. In short, while the end is to deliver a quality product to your customers, there are too many things to consider and take care of before you can do so.
With the addition of a new feature, along with it comes a complexity expense. It is yet another thing to be added to the testing matrix. It is another inclusion which can either enhance or set-back dependencies. It is another addition which requires maintenance and could be a resource of tech debt in the future.
Complexity cost is the debt that occurs by complication of technology or features while solving problems. An app which performs twenty tasks is tougher to re-factor in comparison to the app which does one thing. Thus, changing of code in this will take longer. Often complexity is a basic expense but only companies which completely internalize the idea can hope to secure such spending. With the maturity of the product, new functionality calls up for a higher risk. When you aren’t just improving a present item, you’re kind of adding up a new widget which can bring down the value proposition, bug up your sales exertions, confuse users and suck sources away from the basic elements of your app.
And, when there is this natural tendency to just add features, it can easily cause feature bloating.
Ideas To Balance Innovation And Technical Debt
Finding out when to include something new rather than just fixing the old one is a tricky work. Check out some of the ways to find out how to make it happen easily:
- 1. Rank the needs of customers {not their wants}
- 2. Customers are genuinely the biggest source for ideas, but they aren’t always a resource for great ideas. They may be well-versed during the complexities of your products or in the software development procedure in common. So, rather than allowing them to design the solution, make use of their expertise to completely solve the issue.
- 3. Customer want {Customers require a button for every person or group they wish to send a message to} V/S
- 4. Customer need {Customers basically need to send message to the complete team, few of the messages to the sub groups and few messages to one person at a time}
Dedicated buttons could be the best way to handle message routing or it may work as a disaster which could slow down the UI in the future or might not work well in the mobile version of the application. Now, it is the job of the company to find out how they can meet the needs of the customer without creating any issues for the development team. The basic idea to make all this work is to allow your customers to know that you will be addressing their needs and that it will be achieved without hampering the flexibility. Click here to find out how to fight tech debt that often occurs amidst the planning and functioning of the development team.
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