Your Vision. Comes to Life.
We’ll take you from MVP to a scalable, production-ready, business growth machine.
Explore our 9-step process for creating production scale in 3 project phases: Plan, Polish & Present:
This phase takes you through this journey of transformation:
The steps:
Consider and plan for non-functional requirements that need to be present for successfully supporting your customers. Performance requirements are only 1 part of the equation. Consider also availability, capacity, compliance, data retention, disaster recovery, integrability (e.g., available API), privacy, stability, supportability, testability and many others.
Design application performance monitoring (APM). The design might be to use a cloud provider’s APM offering, or adding capabilities directly within your product. In either case, being able to measure and report on application health is critical. Further, you might add metrics for business statistics to help you measure CAC, LTV and other important business metrics.
Taking what we know from steps 1 & 2, we start designing how the application will scale and handle all of your customer’s needs. You may be considering microservices, distributed data storage (e.g., sharding), performance clusters, moving logic to the frontend, offloading long tasks, load balancing, event-driven architecture, messaging or any of a number of other possibilities.
This phase takes you through this journey of transformation:
The steps:
Now we start putting together the design built out in the previous phase. We put the development structures together that will allow us to test in step 5 and measure in step 6.
During MVP development, there was likely a lot of code that was assembled quickly and not necessarily with a long-term view in mind. This needs refactored. Also, we’ve likely made some different decisions on architecture, so it is now time to incorporate these technologies and perhaps to significantly restructure code around a different, more scalable approach.
Let’s hit the track! Like in a tractor pull competition, we’re going to strap on the sled and pile on the weight until we make it stop. This will give us information like maximum requests per minute.
This phase takes you through this journey of transformation:
The steps:
Minimizing downtime is an important aspect of providing a good user experience, and good user experience means higher customer retention. While a mundane topic, ensuring that data is backed up, that there’s a disaster recovery plan, that deployments don’t bring the system down and that data is properly structured for scaling, are all critical aspects of a production application ready for growth. We get this right in this step of our process.
Not only is it critical that the application be tested after the potentially major refactoring of getting it ready for growth, a thorough plan for ensuring quality upon each release is also of upmost importance. In this step, we ensure that we have test plans, test suites and test scripts. Whether using test automation or manual testing, being prepared, disciplined, and sufficiently thorough is critical.
Using all of our planning and strategy, we roll out the new version. Depending upon the architectural design, we may roll this out slowly or all at once. Whatever the approach, contingency planning and minimizing the impact of a failure are the goals of this step. As with all of our steps, we aim to reduce risk to your business.
Scaling a product is not a trivial matter. Software Prophets provides decades of experience in building applications that users want to use. With experience in building scalable apps, we are well-equipped for this technically challenging task. Completing the steps in this product development offering, you will show your customers true professionalism, giving them the confidence they need to continue spending money to use your product.
Although this is the final product offering in our Your Vision Builder Playbook series, Software Prophets remains available for product support after completing this work. There is a likelihood that we will continue to cycle through these product offerings.
For example, as you build out new functionality, you will likely want to go through all 4 products again, starting with the proof of concept that understands the user’s jobs-to-be-done and progresses through to complimenting your existing scalable design. Although the steps may be somewhat compressed as compared to the initial build, those steps remain necessary.
If you would like some help or just have some questions about this, let’s schedule a time to talk by clicking this button and selecting a convenient time.