Digital Transformation

When a project is unsuccessful, there could be many causes. However, lack of overall vision, and alignment among the team around that vision is a likely culprit. Every successful venture must grow around a strategic vision that the entire team is on board with. Here are 7 tactics we’ve used to ensure success and meet product goals on over 135 projects in the last 15 years.

If you’re a “PM”, you’re in the right place. This article is for those that find themselves drowning in the world of product development, where your vital work is often misunderstood or underappreciated. You know that when it comes to creating a product vision to build a product that meets business goals and ultimately, achieves product/market fit, you’ll experience pushback from senior management.

Being a small business owner, you undoubtedly know what it’s like to be feel overwhelmed with all the day-to-day tasks it takes to run a business. Even if you have enough employees and/or freelancers working for you, there never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done. So, why would you consider putting one more thing on your to-do list, such as learning and implementing new technology in your operations?

The design process can be messy and monotonous. To reduce the propensity for error and create scalability, designers build out a design system. Most practically defined as “a set of reasonable patterns and behaviors that define the product”, a design system is a simple, yet seemingly revolutionary way to produce quality design work, efficiently. It is often described as the “single source of truth” for the entire team involved in a product’s development.

Enterprise application integration is a vessel of ease and efficiency. In its simplest and most practical form, EAI is designed to improve the connectivity of applications within an enterprise. Though the term “EAI” wasn’t coined until the early 2000s, the greater concept is decades old: find a way to seamlessly join multiple business-critical systems that are themselves, distinct.

In my previous article, I talked about serverless architecture and some of the benefits this platform has to offer for writing web apps. The scalability of serverless applications is hard to refuse, and so the temptation is to dive right in and start writing code on AWS Lambda functions or Azure Functions. After diving in, however, you will quickly run into a problem: how are thousands or even millions of function instances going to talk to one MySQL database at the same time? If you are building a high-traffic application, this is going to quickly become a bottleneck. For example, the Azure Database for MySQL has an upper limit of 20,000 concurrent connections. Each Function or Lambda instance is going to have its own connection to the database, and so that’s just not a viable solution.

What is a brand, when you really think about it? A few professional ex-colleagues I know often think of a brand as the visual assets that represent the company – such as the logo they use, or the color palette they identify with, or a brand/style guide. Strangely enough, both of them worked for the same creative agency. Their answer is wrong. It’s true that these are components of a brand (a visual brand identity)… and for some companies, this might be the only effort they’re actively willing to dedicate to branding. But a logo does not begin to encapsulate what a brand is, let alone how important it is to a company’s success.