creating an ecommerce store
Blog

Importance of creating an ecommerce store

Written by EvaMarch 7, 2023

In today’s digital age, having an online presence is crucial for businesses of all sizes. With the vast majority of consumers using the internet to research and purchase products, it’s essential to have a website and social media presence for your store. In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of having an online presence for your store and why it’s important to invest in your digital marketing strategy.

  1. Increased Visibility

The first and most obvious benefit of having an online presence is increased visibility. With a website and social media accounts, you have the opportunity to reach a wider audience than you would with just a physical storefront. By optimizing your website for search engines and utilizing social media platforms to promote your business, you can attract new customers who may not have discovered your store otherwise.

  1. Convenience for Customers

Having an online presence also provides convenience for your customers. With the ability to shop from the comfort of their own homes, customers can browse your products and make purchases at any time of day or night. This is especially beneficial for customers who have busy schedules or live far away from your physical location.

In addition, having an online presence can make it easier for customers to contact your store with questions or concerns. By including a contact form or email address on your website, customers can reach out to you without having to visit your store in person.

  1. Increased Credibility

In today’s digital age, having a website is often seen as a sign of legitimacy and credibility. By having a professional-looking website, you can establish your store as a trusted and reputable business. This can be especially important for new or small businesses that may not have an established reputation yet.

  1. Better Customer Insights

An online presence also provides valuable insights into your customers’ behavior and preferences. By utilizing website analytics and social media analytics tools, you can track how customers are interacting with your website and social media accounts. This information can help you make informed decisions about your marketing strategy and product offerings.

For example, if you notice that a particular product is getting a lot of engagement on social media, you may want to consider promoting it more heavily or expanding your product line to include similar items.

  1. Opportunity for Growth

Having an online presence also opens up opportunities for growth and expansion. By reaching a wider audience and gaining insights into customer behavior, you can identify new markets and potential product offerings. This can help you grow your business and increase your revenue over time.

In addition, having an online presence can make it easier to expand your business into new geographic regions. By offering online ordering and shipping, you can reach customers who may not have access to your physical store.

  1. Cost-Effective Marketing

One of the biggest benefits of having an online presence is that it can be a cost-effective way to market your business. While traditional advertising methods like print ads and billboards can be expensive, digital marketing is often much more affordable.

With social media marketing, for example, you can reach a large audience with a relatively small budget. By creating engaging social media posts and running targeted ads, you can promote your business to potential customers without breaking the bank.

  1. Increased Sales

Ultimately, having an online presence can lead to increased sales and revenue for your store. By reaching a wider audience and providing convenience for customers, you can attract new customers and retain existing ones. In addition, by utilizing online marketing strategies like email marketing and social media advertising, you can drive sales and promote your products to customers who may not have visited your store otherwise.

Conclusion

In today’s digital age, having an online presence is essential for businesses of all sizes. By providing increased visibility, convenience for customers, increased credibility, better customer insights, opportunities for growth, cost-effective marketing, and increased sales, an online presence can help you grow your business and reach new heights

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Blog

Strategies for Managing Remote Employees

Written by EvaJune 20, 2022

Make the remote-work experience productive and engaging for both employees and your company! It’s the time for managers to change their approach to remote work!

With hybrid workplaces emerging as a result of the pandemic times, managers find themselves responsible for supervising remote employees. Even though remote work is beneficial for both you and your employees, it can present a few challenges for managers and team leaders. Managing virtual teams is not that easy, it’s something that needs to be done in a specific way.

Here’re some challenges of managing remote employees:

The typical work arrangement & remote work differs in many aspects! Remote work calls for different skills from the team like better time management, the capability to follow written procedures, and a flair to communicate using information and new gen communication technologies effectively.

It so happens that both the employees and the manager may not have remote work experience and assume that what worked in the office can be taken as such and transferred to the remote environment. Managers may need to know how to effectively hire and manage remote employees. Ifthey cansearch out, hire and onboard employees effectively they will not struggle in a remote setting.

Check out the top tips for managing remote employees to ensure productivity from Tuner Labs:

Be clear in your expectations

Managing remote teams becomes simplified if you as a manager ensure that your remote employees know exactly what your expectations are! You can communicate how often you want them to check in or they should track their time. The updates from each team member can be on a daily basis or a weekly briefing. This way you can make sure you’re in sync with your remote team.

Engage as often as possible

One of the best strategies for managing remote teams is to maintain constant interaction with your remote employees at least once a day. You should try to engage directly with remote employees either through an email, instant message, phone call or video chat so that they do not feel left out and become disengaged from their work. With consistent interaction with each team member, you can ensure they feel motivated, included and valued. This may lead to good performance and high turnover.

Use technology to overcome geographic restrictions

Nowadays there exist many sophisticated technologies & tools to manage remote employees. Chat and team collaboration tools (e.g., Slack), project management systems, screen sharing tools, video conferencing software, time tracking apps and more can be used to manage a remote workforce.

Whatever technology you use to enable remote work can also be used to build a community. Encourage more face-to-face interactions and create spaces like separate instant messenger channels or online forums for employees to interact easily. You can also hold virtual celebrations of events for your team of remote employees.

Provide the right resources for your team

Give proper training and resources to your remote employees. Equip them with new laptops, better WiFi, and new technology like headsets and webcams. This can make it easy for you to manage your remote workforce. Set up the same access to things utilised by onsite employees for your remote employees also like:

  • Policy and procedure manuals
  • Presentation templates and supplies
  • Mail supplies and stationery
  • Software programs
  • Corporate credit card

Document your communication

Remote employees should have something for reference and it is crucial that you document your communication process. You can outline what kinds of questions or issues necessitate a group meeting or video call instead of a quick message or email. You can provide details about timing and responsiveness like how soon you expect a response to an email during working hours.

Schedule regular team meetings

Regular group meetings, virtual team building activities & live virtual events helps to foster a sense of unity amongst remote employees. Be it your workforce is partially or fully remote, employees bond over these meetings. As they get to know each other, they connect and feel more inclined to work as a team.

Not just that, team meetings are an open platform for remote workers to contribute their ideas and clear up miscommunications regarding project details, deadlines and expectations.

Be mindful of Zoom fatigue

Burnout or tiredness caused by an overdose of video meetings is called Zoom fatigue. Alternate communication methods like email, messaging apps, phone calls etc. can be used for supporting transition time between meetings. Apart from that, making some social meetings optional can help combat Zoom fatigue.

Make transparency a part of team culture

Be a role model to your employees by being open and honest and they will naturally follow your example of how to behave in the workplace. This way it’s easier to build trust with all employees and make sure they feel comfortable coming to you with any questions or concerns. You should make sure that your transparency extends equally to all team members. 

Build a strong rapport

When running a remote office, it’s always good if you can get to know your remote employees in the same way as your in-office employees. You can develop a personal connection by taking interest in their hobbies, interests and career aspirations. Try to always set aside a few minutes for small talk at the beginning or end of your meetings and help them feel more comfortable with you. Recent studies have found that employees who have friendships and personal connections at work are more engaged and motivated to work.

Have regular one-on-one conversations

For effectively managing remote teams, regular one-on-one conversations are a must! These meetings are highly important as it so happens that remote employees often miss small updates and ad hoc meetings that happen throughout the day that you have with your in-office employees. Try to schedule one-on-one meetings on a weekly or bi-weekly basis for at least half an hour with each of your remote employees. You can give feedback or employees can raise concerns, ask questions or share their ideas in these meetings.

Don’t micromanage

Remote employees love the autonomy that comes with their work! While managing remote employees, it’s easy to assume they’re not working properly. Micromanaging behaviour like an overdose of communications and continuously asking for progress reports does not go well with remote employees. Do settle for subtle queries.

Focus on goals and results rather than visible activity and hours worked. As long as remote employees are getting their work done well and on time, their work style may be immaterial. Simultaneously, ensure that remote employees aren’t taking advantage of their autonomy by wasting time and ignoring their workload before it affects team productivity.

Include remote employees

Do not exclude remote employees out of meaningful discussions about company objectives, visions and/or plans. When you or one of your team members share crucial information, be sure to pass along the message to your remote employees as well. Send employee satisfaction surveys periodically to get feedback on how remote employees feel about their work environment.

Increase recognition

Try motivating your remote employee achievers with effective recognition like public acknowledgment, tokens of appreciation, development opportunities and low-cost perks. This serves as a strong signal for others to emulate & follow. You can take this opportunity to provide development opportunities to employees who normally do not perform well

Encourage innovation

Employee engagement and organisational success depends much on innovation and risk-taking. Managers can provide opportunities for innovation or process improvements for their remote employees.

These are only a few tips for managing virtual employees. Remote workers can be just as productive as in-office employees, remember you just have to motivate them and set them up for success!

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Blog

What is an offshore development centre (ODC)?

Written by EvaMay 12, 2022

Targeting business growth, your next agenda? Rethink your business model! Build a more resilient and flexible business by spending minimum resources and completing projects in the shortest time possible! Offshore development services in India are a popular and effective alternative for companies due to their cost-effectiveness and excellent access to the huge availability of tech experts.

In the business world of today, many companies have switched to dedicated offshore development in India to increase their business output & drastically reduce their time to market. As a faster, cheaper, more efficient way to streamline and manage business operations an Offshore development centre in India will only add value to your business.

What is an offshore development centre?

It’s more like an extended office based in another part of the world where a dedicated offshore team supports your company. Offshoring the software development process to a country where production costs are lesser means more budget resources can be allocated to more needy things.

The ODC business model has become quite popular with different kinds of companies including startups and enterprise companies. It has been used for diverse business processes and services like:

  • Creating and maintaining solutions and software
  • Project management
  • Testing and migration
  • Technical or customer support

Having a partner company in an offshore location will give you the advantage of good infrastructure and assistance in securing, mentoring & managing high-quality resources resulting in best productivity.

An Offshore development centre India consists of a team of integrated talents like:

  • Account Manager – Manages client relationships and ensures on-time delivery of high-quality projects. Also reaches out with other services or support.
  • Project Manager – Ensures that all the requirements relating to budget, scope, schedule, communication, and other resources are met in a project.
  • Designers and Developers – In charge of the design, installation, testing, and maintenance of your software.
  • Test Engineers – Check and verify the integrity, quality, and even non-functional requirements of your product.
  • Usability Engineers – The usability or user-friendliness of your product are evaluated by these usability engineers.
  • Graphic Designers – Create visual and graphical concepts or text to promote a product’s unique persona or brand.
  • Content and Technical Writers – Responsible for creating content and instructions integrated into the software or website.

How does an Offshore Software Development Centre work?

When it comes to software services, they are generally quite expensive in comparison with other services. Hence obtaining these services from a country where manpower is cheaper without compromising the quality of work is quite a smart decision! You don’t have to pay for a lot more extra things like travel expenses, housing expenses etc. other than just the salary of the employee.

Moreover, you get a highly professional team of members who excel in their field of work. You may have to train them as per your requirements but once they are trained well, their services can prove to be quite valuable to your company. They will understand your style of working and work towards achieving excellence with efficient offshore development services project management.

Differences between outsourcing & setting up an Offshore Development Centre

If your company faces a shortage of software engineers or you want to scale without spending more money on infrastructure, outsourcing work to a different country is a good option. With a good outsourcing partner your business can tread the path to success.

Before taking the leap with outsourcing, let’s check out the differences between ODC and Outsourcing:

Scaling

  • Outsourcing – With outsourcing you can start small, and then extend the scope to full-stack complex projects.
  • ODC – If you have in hand large size long-term projects requiring skilled expertise, committed attention and professional support, setting up an Offshore Development Centre is a great option.

Developer commitment

  • Outsourcing – A developer in an outsourcing set up would be working on more than one project for different companies at a time.
  • ODC – Here, a dedicated team will be working exclusively for all the projects in your company in an office set up for this purpose.

The size of team

  • Outsourcing – The size of the team solely depends on your project, and the time to market.
  • ODC – You can hire an entire team of professionals and assign the tasks in an ODC.

Hiring

  • Outsourcing – The vendor usually has their own team and tasks are assigned based on their skill and potential.
  • ODC – According to client requirements, the team with specific skill levels are selected carefully.

Scaling up the team

  • Outsourcing – More members are recruited and added to the team by the vendor according to your requirements.
  • ODC – Scaling of the team will be done with active participation from the company itself.

Support system

  • Outsourcing – The support team which includes the accounting team, project managers, HR etc. will be set by the vendor company,
  • ODC – The support team is completely set up by the parent company and they will have a good idea of the roles and expertise of each support team member.

What are the benefits of an Offshore Development Centre?

Partnering with an ODC provider can result in a lot of benefits to your company. Here are the main advantages of having an ODC:

  • Reduce costs in infrastructure – As the offshore service provider has already set up the requisite infrastructure, you don’t have to spend on setting up office facilities and equipment, IT infrastructure and utilities.
  • Autoscaling your IT department – As per the requirements of specific projects, the resources needed may fluctuate. Autoscaling or dynamically allocating resources to match performance requirements is possible with an ODC. The offshore team can absorb the roles or tasks from the in-house team making it easy.
  • Reliable & efficient operations – Prime ODC companies strictly adhere to efficient evaluation and reporting procedures to be accountable and transparent to their clients. You’ll be able to assess and monitor the progress of the projects in real-time and if you do not find the results of the project satisfactory, you can demand to redo the project with no additional costs if your contract with the ODC specifies it.
  • On-time delivery of projects – Working under optimised environments and streamlined procedures an ODC ensures timely delivery of your projects. The project timelines that you set are strictly followed right from planning, design, development, testing and deployment. The in-house team and the offshore team collaborate seamlessly to ensure shorter timeframes for the project lifecycle.
  • Technical support and knowledge retention – With an ODC, you can expect continuous technical support during the entire lifecycle of the project. With a positive approach to knowledge retention, the ODC’s preserve all the knowledge gained during a project’s life cycle which can be further developed and improvised so you can use it for other projects.
  • Access to the best skills and technology – The offshore teams in the premier ODC companies have highly qualified IT professionals with specialised expertise in developing customised software for your targeted customers. These ODC’s invest in regular training and upgrade of the skills of their employees. All these factors ensure you get good returns on your investment in an ODC.

Offshore development centre security

It should be one of your biggest considerations when selecting an ODC! Enterprise-grade firewalls and network monitoring are implemented by ODCs to prevent attacks while the data is being transferred. Network monitoring tools can keep track of incoming and outgoing traffic on the network while a quality firewall will stop suspicious traffic from accessing the network, server, or computer.

Are you ready for your offshore development journey? Choosing a reliable ODC partner is critical for your business! With years of experience in delivering quality output, Tuner Labs can help you set up a robust and scalable offshore development centre in India.

Get in touch with us at info@tunerlabs.comto know how we can assist you in building a full-fledged offshore development centre in India.

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Blog, Product Engineering

BeSpoke web applications development

Written by EvaJanuary 12, 2020

Boon Of Bespoke Software Development

Bespoke software development has become one of the important components in making an efficient and profitable business. The demand for software development service with a unique design to figure out mission-critical needs keeps increasing.

Business is directly proportional to Custome Software Development:

Following are the best 10 benefits provided by bespoke software solutions, which helps in changing the business landscape.

1. Streamlining Existing In-House Processes with Bespoke Software Solutions

Custom software helps in enhancing in-house operations and helps in increasing productivity of the organization which in turn increases the headcount of the employes.

A good bespoke software development company should concentrate on addressing issues without compromising the service quality and remove internal bottlenecks.

This helps in good business output, more efficient by saving time, reduces the cost and which results in high margins. It also helps in reducing internal complexities and adds value for the long run.

2. Internet of Things(IoT): Supports Innovation with Integration

Provides connectivity to our everyday devices like physical objects and helps in making the life of the customer easier with the help of IoT solutions provided.

IoT has revolutionalized industries and market with even more changes down the line.

IoT technology benefits:

Businesses are fully into the digital landscape these days. Innovative IoT solutions help in running with the bespoke software which helps in improving the customer’s experiences with Google services. IoT helps in enhancing brand reputation and adds value to the company.

IoT enabled software helps in improving business and resource utilization in the best way. It also reduces menial labor and enhances the quality of data with customer feedback and reporting. Also helps in shorter time-to-market and improves in the return value of the investment.

3. Larger Data and Targeted Insights:

Purpose-built software is very effective in interpreting data and mission intelligence.

4. Minimize Disruption with the use of Bespoke Software Development Company:

Adopting new software or IT infrastructure is one of the biggest challenges in organizations. An experienced software company helps in deciding the making or breaking of the project.

Whats the Idle way to figure out minimal disruption during software roll-out?

By having a well experienced and knowledgeable bespoke by your side, helps in benefiting businesses.

A well-organized software company will have a well-planned software architecture ensuring operational needs of the customer, with a good user-friendly process.

In digitizing and modernizing the existing systems staff software adoption plays a vital role, a gradual change over is always better than a big switch.

5. Brand Identities of Bespoke Software Solutions:

It is very difficult to maintain a brand identity across multiple cloud-based systems.

Businesses that are not able to maintain brand identity will also find hard to maintain customer loyalty and staffs. Bespoke software solutions help in providing your existing identity of brands.

6. Well-Organized workflow can be achieved by Custom Software:

Custom-built solutions provide a digital workflow which helps in improving the key components of the business such as marketing capability etc.

How does Bespoke software help in organizing the workflow?

The bespoke application should fall in sync with your existing requirements and practices.

Manual task such as report generation, email notifications, etc has to be automated and optimize the workflows. Integrate with the other online processes, like Google Calendar can be integrated for auto notifications, similarly for billing PayPal can be used, etc.

7. Custome Software Development can Target specific Demographics:

Bespoke provides solutions for geographic and demographic parameters for the best market fit.

Is bespoke software compatible with relative environments?

Targetting the right people at the right time plays an important role in modern businesses. This can be achieved by figuring out the matrices such as purchase history, habits, locations, etc.

In order to create well responsive environment metrics such as gender and social media, inputs must also be considered.

8. Software Development services help in enabling easy expansion and modularity:

No software should stagnate, as the business changes eventually the application needs to be upgraded based on real-world situations

Is bespoke software flexible? Can it scale according to the business demands?

The iterative process of updating the database in order to add further more data or by disabling the functions which are no longer required etc can be offered by custom-built solutions.

9. Can Custom made software automate business processes and take over centralized control?

Automating the core business functions such as sales etc are addressed with ease.

How does business automation help a business?

Custom-developed software helps in automating a task that is time-consuming and repetitive, provides better control, cross-channel communication, and coordination with the team.

Real-time examples of custom software solutions are self-service portal and chatbot. These platforms demonstrate that customers are focused on digital experience and meet there demands quickly

10. Go Remote

In the modern business environment, it is must to have mobile responsive applications.

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NodeJs

Scaling a nodejs Application

Written by EvaJanuary 10, 2020

Node.js is a javascript run-time environment helps in the server-side execution.

Efficiency and performance with less resources plays a very important role.

To increase the throughput of any web application is to scale it up. During this process it is important to concentrate on different possible aspects of the application while scaling up Node.js. 

Scaling Horizontally – Node.js application:

Horizontal scaling is duplicating the application to manage large number of incoming connections. This process can be experienced on single multi-core machine or in different machines.

Vertical scaling is increasing the machine performance.

One machine with multiple-process

One best way to increase the efficiency of the application is to spawn one process for each core of machine. Its not good to spawn a number of processes bigger than the number of cores.

There are different methods used for scaling on single machine, the commonly used concept is to have many processes running on the same port, with the help of internal load balancing which helps in distributing the incoming connects across the processes.

Native cluster state:

Native node.js module is the basic path to scale node applications on single machine. One of the process is known as “master” which is responsible to spawn the other child processes called as “workers”. The connections are distributed using the round-robin strategy to all the workers, which has the service on the same port.

Challenge in this approach is to manage between the master and worker inside the code with if-else block, without the ability to modify the processes.

PM2 Cluster mode

If PM2 is used as process manager, which has the magic cluster features that helps you to scale your process across all the cores. The PM2 will act as the mater process, and spawn N processes of application as workers with round-robin methods.

By this we write application for single-core usage kind and PM2 will care for multi-core part.

Once the application is started in the cluster mode, the number of instances can be adjusted using “pm2 scale”, and with “0-second-downtime” reloads. The processes are restarted in series to make sure that there is always at least one process online.

Network load balancing for multiple machines:

Scaling across multiple machines is similar with that of scaling on multiple cores, there will be multiple machines which will have one or more processes running and the balancer will redirect the traffic to different machine.

Deployment of network balancer can be done in different ways. If you choose to go with AWS it users a managed load balancer like Elastic Load Balancer, as it supports auto-scaling feature.

If you wish to try doing it in old-school, then just deploy a machine and set a balancer with NGINX by yourself. By doing this the load balancer will be the only entrypoint for the application. 

Traffic can be distributed between the balancers by adding multiple DNS records to the main domain, so the DNS will distribute the traffic and resolving to different IP address each time.

What next?

Now you got to know how to scale Node.js app in the various levels to obtain the possible best performance. Take an extra care when you are using the application in multi-process environment, you will come across many problems and unexpected behaviours.

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Product Engineering

5 Tips for Outsourcing Product Development

Written by EvaAugust 28, 2019

Great products are meant to change the world! You may have a brilliant idea in your mind but that doesn’t mean you should have a large product design firm at your disposal! Today it’s no big deal! Outsourcing product development has become so common place that many successful projects have been launched as a result of it.

As an entrepreneur, you don’t need to worry about the details. The outsource team can develop the new software product from start-to-finish. This increases the chances to have your work done faster in a more professional way, and you can concentrate on the more significant stuff. But still before you take the big leap there are things to consider…

At Tuner Labs, a product development company for startups we know it is pretty difficult for you to take the right decision. We are there to help you to develop cloud based software products. Here are five tips to check out before you start outsourcing the development of your new product.

1. Always stay in the loop and constantly be learning.

Your product is your vision & you need to pursue it constantly! By handing it over to an outsourcing firm, you no longer will have as much control of it as before. But you need to always stay in the loop & not take off from the process at this vital moment. By doing this you can realise your vision & avoid any regrets later.

Be in the project as a guide just to give it the much needed push forward! You don’t have to do everything yourself, but you need to remain in control of each step. If you’re a non technical person you may not be able to understand the development process but it would make things easier if you add a tech-savvy person at your side as a co-founder and you can concentrate on the non-technical side. That way you can develop a product, even if you’re non-technical!

2. Easy Communication through wireframing

Communication paves the way towards the success of your project! It’s important that you get your message across to your product engineering team in the most effective way so that they understand the idea of your project and get results. You should make your draft more detailed and understandable so that you will get what you want, with fewer questions received, and lesser costs are involved in the process.

Wireframing can be done to get your idea across to the team. You create a skeleton of your product with screens layout, a navigation system, and its main functions in the wire frame. It can also describe the main purpose of your product as well as its core functionality. The product engineering team with people experienced in modern technologies and visualizing skills will be able to understand the wireframe and develop the product accordingly. Wireframes can be done using diverse ways – from pen and paper to various wireframing tools like desktop, web-based, and mobile applications.

3. Reduce your risk by implementing checks and balances

Getting a second opinion on your product’s design reduces your risk during the development process. You should also allow flexibility to a certain level and be able to compromise on the features of your product. Being too strict on features may result in the software product not to be built eventually.

The first version of your product may not be perfect. But just allow it to be designed, built, tested, and finally launched. You can add all the features you need later on. Concentrate on the core functionality and the problem it solves, you can better it afterwards.

4. Agile methodologies & Outsourcing

Agile and outsourcing combination is ideal for getting great results! Recent trends have shown that many companies combine the benefits of outsourcing and the flexibility offered by agile methodology. Outsourcing product development means access to an extensive base of professionals, reduced costs & high-quality development. By implementing agile techniques, you can make changes during software development process of your product as and when needed and get a quick and flexible response. Setting specific timeframes for completing a particular body of work also can be done. As the development system becomes very adaptable to changes, this can aid improvement of the upcoming product throughout the whole development cycle.

5. Right communication can do wonders!

Even the greatest project can fail due to poor communication! That is why communication should be given prima facie importance in the outsourcing process. While choosing an outsourcing product development company for your product development, just check out how quickly it responds, the communication capabilities, and which communication channels and formats are being used etc. All these will play a role during the working process. Quality interaction with your outsourcing team is highly essential in the agile way of doing things…

It’s the time to go the extra mile & and learn! You can develop new skills, and challenge your fears. Once you have fixed an outsourced product development partner, set up an internal team to do the assessment to evaluate the performance of your product development partner on a quarterly or monthly, basis.

Now that you have gone through these 5 tips in outsourcing your product development you can now confidently go about it and you will set yourself on the road to success! All the very best to you…

Note: Tunerlabs is a leading technology solutions company & a product development company for startups creating end to end cloud based software products. We cater to clients across the globe. Our extensive portfolio includes technology consulting, custom development to managed staffing & we take care of the process from concept to the final stage for our valued clients.

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Product Engineering

Product Development Outsourcing

Written by EvaAugust 28, 2019

Product development Outsourcing is a critical decision for any organization when made. The common goal for outsourcing the development is Quality product and Cost saving. This involves many factors :

1. Cost Saving on Hiring :  Need not interview a lot of them, and then build a productive team as a whole.

2. Wide Range of Technologies: You get access to there employees, options of choosing the right tool and also to experience knowledge as equivalent to that of developers.

3. Scalability: Along with the product roadmap team size would be scalable with the skills required, and when outsourcing is done the risk is transferred to the contractor to maintain the engineering team and product owner concentrate on the core business idea, sales channels, and users- which is very important for the business.

product development process

What to expect when you outsource product development and how to make efficient interaction process.

1. Set Minimum Viable Product: No wonder that market is changing rapidly and if Go to Market is taking a year, then it will be an out-dated one. So, at the start release a minimalistic solution, that solves the basic needs and then add functionality to it.

2. Interact with the team: In rapid software development, creates an additional burden on you as a customer. In Agile methodology, Product owner- a role is required to define the functionality of the product and prioritizing the features. The role here is not a person, responsibility of the role should be divided.

3. Quality comes with a price, nothing is free:  Many freelance developers can develop a clone of any product, but behind that many inefficient management and defects are going to exist. In the long run, the product owner ends up with scalability issue. Choosing the right set of the team with little extra cost goes profitable in the long run.

4. Share the vision and know-how: Share your whole business idea, an outsourcing company will not steal the idea from you but understands the key concepts of business, your problems, strategies, budget, timing, and features. Understanding the business is a very important factor for the outsourcing development team to build a quality Product for you.

What is required/ not required before you start outsourcing software development

Required:

1. Sound understanding of product concept: Identity purpose, users and monetization methods. Tools that can help: Impact Mapping, Canva Business Modeling, Customer Interviews, A/B testing with Landing Pages.

2. Create some designs and mockups: Basic mockup or sketches and the customer road map is important. The neat design should be maintained as in this stage to understand how your users will “navigate” the product and features they will use.

3. Fix the budget and schedule: Share this with your contractor, and determine the amount of time to communicate with the team. Phase wise demo for progress to monitor the development of the product.

Not Required:

The hiring of the technical writer or business analyst.

What to be known when a team is selected

Kick-off phase with a technical expert, sales manager, and project manager

1. Discuss the main artifacts of the project, make a plan on what is missing, vision about the project’s purpose, users and threads.

2. Interaction with designers from the beginning is very important as design is the critical part of the application. Once the design prototype is signed off then the actual product development should kick off.

3. Discuss the division of the Product Owner responsibility.

4. Keep updates with product development and delivery. Phase wise demo is important to meet the timeline for Go to Market plan.

Clear Project Road map

The product roadmap is very important from day one. Phase wise product feature planning and the design part comes at the first phase.

At this phase, changes are affordable in terms of cost and time. Once development starts the price of correcting the product flow change will increase at each stage. We are almost involved in the process to avoid such situations, but without your expert knowledge,  we are unlikely to build an innovative product.

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Product Engineering

How to build a Minimum Viable Product?

Written by EvaAugust 28, 2019

The main reason for any MVP is to quickly experiment in order to know about the overall direction for any product to be successful for the targeted audience. Product ideas might be awesome but when it comes finalizing the right set of features for the MVP, most of the organizations take longer time in decision making as many stakeholders are involved during this phase. This article will help you decide better on how to build a minimum viable product.

Few of the common mistakes made by the organizations/startups that we have experienced so far. Two important questions that they need to ask is when anyone planning for an MVP is :

  1. What is the purpose of the Product?
  2. How will it help for the betterment?
how to build a minimum viable product

Following approach would help a better product for your future customers.

  1. Competitor research is important

Always good to have competitor analysis, just to check if there are similar products out in the market.

And the feature uniqueness of the product alone is not enough to keep up the product in the market.

2. Spending a lot beyond the budget is bad:

Any product development has a certain cost associated as bootstrapped when we talk about Product MVP. To reduce the cost and timeline to hit the customer with the launch of the product, it is always advisable to stick with only one platform ( web/ mobile), based on the usability scenarios of the product.

Product launch as MVP gives the first-hand feedback coming from consumers, helps stakeholder to take the next set of action. MVP even helps to pitch the whole product roadmap to Investors to make the full-fledged product.

3. Phase wise planning is important !!

Prioritize the features that are part of the overall feature list in a phase-wise manner. Before building an MVP  highlight all the key features that you think are important to have.

Once you prioritize ask the following questions for yourself:

i. Which one action that you wish your user to accomplish through the product?

ii. Unique Selling Point ( USP ) of your product good to be introduced in MVP launch to avoid long term business risk.

Before we start working on MVP good to categories as “Most-important”,”Good-to-have”, and “not-important” – Ask the developers to implement accordingly, which will help in reducing the risk of MVP failure.

How Minimum MVP to be set?

“The minimum value product is a product with the minimum features that fulfill the early customers, and get feedback for future development…”
Based on the product you must be clear that you need a really good User Experience ( UX Design ) for your app consumers or a minimum design would work.

Remember “MVP is just not about building the other versions of your app or creating the newer work-flows. Implementing the basic features, without the essence of its viability is not the MVP….”

We hope you have got fair idea on how to build a minimum viable product. Thats a great first step! Lets work on “fair to have” and “must have” features now!

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Product Engineering

Hybrid Mobile development – ReactNative or Ionic ?

Written by EvaAugust 28, 2019

Which framework you are going to use for your hybrid mobile application is critical and important as you must consider few aspects in advance for future scaling of the product. Here we will guide you whether you can develop your application in ReactNative or Ionic ?

React Native v/s Ionic

ReactNative and Ionic are popular mobile App development languages. Both React Native and Ionic gives various contrasting features and acts as a framework development medium. Both support Android and iOS.

Ionic : Ionic is an angular framework and powered by Google. It uses an HTML template for view and holds MVC architecture. It’s a hybrid development framework and uses web technologies to build an application. It requires PhoneGap/Cordova to access the native features and provides a good user experience.

Ionic is easy to learn. The code can be written in typescript, which helps the developers who are from Angular background. It has few cons as well :

  • The performance issue is faced when using a lot of callbacks to the native code.
  • If the native UI is preferred, then the same UI look will be across all the devices – it does not give a different “Look and Feel”.

React Native: React native is a javascript framework and developed by Facebook. It does not aim at “Write Once and Run Everywhere”, rather they want developers to use the components with its native behavior of the platform. Few components will go well for Android and may not for iOS, thus you can make use of something else for iOS as their platform-specific logic are easy. It has the following advantage:

  • The same code can be used for both Android, iOS and Windows phone.
  • They have better performance compared to that of ionic.
  • React follows stricter design patterns which help for easy maintenance of bigger projects.
  • React Native is more stable.

Test during the development phase:

Ionic: In the app development getting immediate feedback will help in the better development, with ionic we can easily preview the app in the browser and mobile. The changes that are made are instantly refreshed and can see the changes.

React Native: In react the result of changes are instantly reflected as we do it, need not recompile or rebuild every time. 

They also come up with:

Ionic: Ionic is similar to that of CSS framework like bootstrap. It has many components and styles.

React Native: As they rely on native behaviors, styling can be done according to our own creativity.

Plugins and community

React Native: There are many plugins available on NPM, there are also phoneGap/Cardova plugins which can inherit hundreds of plugins from the other community.

Which is the best?

This actually depends on various factors, based on the project, requirements and the skill set of the team. Both has its own benefits and features. However, I would recommend React Native over Ionic as it has the native rendering and the apps are very quick and responsive.

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