rjv.imWho is this book for?
New product development (NPD) is the process of bringing a new product, service, or technology to market. Be it first-time founder or an enterprise - brings new product to market is part of every vision. In this book we focus particularly on "Internet Products" - to distill it further, web and mobile applications.
The main goal of this book is to give enough introduction to understand what all goes into such product development and going to market. It's for everyone who is involved as part this lifecycle.
Taking a product to market which we would be referring to as "Go To Market" (GTM) from here. GTM is a strategy - which leverages your strengths to launch the product. As part of this many are involved like:
- Leadership: Who want to grab the opportunity, depending on maturity of the team discussions sometimes involves terms like TAM or just intuition. Nonetheless, there is an opportunity to be captured.
- Product: Product Team is the one who understands customer needs and pain points and formulate a solution to solve it. All this gets connected to a business plan. This also includes Design team who makes UX/UI.
- Engineering: Technology Team which develops and tests, and handles the scales. They also test the application, deploy it and run it in cloud. They also maintain it.
We can divide above categories further, but it won't add much more value to our discussion. This book is first for Leadership and Product, but Engineering should also read else how would they know what L & P actually know!
Atleast through this book, everyone knows what others knows in the most minimal sense.
How did we write this book?
Our goal from beginning was to keep this book short. We see tons of reviews on good reads, where they say something should have been a blog, or at-least 1/3 smaller than it's supposed to be. Our aim is to get you through this book in one sitting.
Challenge in brushing through concepts is the learning curve and assumptions we should make about our readers. Our effort has been to keep the learning curve flat and also not understand something completely wrong. Sometimes we used hand-drawn images to with your inner child, and sometimes over-simplified metaphors.
But we are sure you would be better off reading this, than not reading this. If you are already aware of all these concepts, you might give us feedback and improve some other lives on this planet.
We tried to keep each chapter to 1-2 pages maximum, and we should end it quickly. So, to close off this chapter - This book is not procedural and doesn't have steps to follow. It's an Intro to certain Concepts, and some information is Analogous - meaning you would extend your knowledge with what you learn here.
In the end, what you end up is some mapping in your brain of these concepts connected to your own knowledge.
What's an Application?
The following are what we mean by applications:
- Mobile App - Something which you install from Play Store of Android or App Store of iOS. You usually search these by name, and click on "Install".
- Web App - Something which you open in browser using a url. Browsers run in mobile and laptops both. An example of browser would be Chrome, Firefox, Edge etc.,
- Desktop App - Something which you install on Macbook or Windows from their Application Stores.
An Opinion: Everything and anything can be an application if we try to generalize. Instead of that, we call only above as Applications or Apps. It's functional, it's dynamic, it responds to user inputs.
What's a Website then!
Usually websites are static, as in they don't change, they informational, they are content. A website and webapp might seem similar - but usage differs. Your user first might land on your website, and then signup/login, and then go to webapp which they are supposed to explore, and use.
We would call "Amazon.com"!
Some products have only mobile apps and a website (no webapp)
Frontend and Backend
App can be a web or mobile app and these are what we typically refer to as "Frontend". Think of it like something which is "front facing" to user, so your customers mostly interacts with them. The buttons on your washing machine is the Frontend of it.
For these applications to work - they are either running in someone's mobile phone or web browser - while they are running there are key operations which make these applications functional:
- The data which they are viewing, explore and filter
- An operation which they are able to do booking, ordering or just saving a note
The product's functionality is what you give to your customer, and that functionality is used by your user using it's frontend and that functionality is facilitated by the Backend.
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Only major concept you need to take away from here is: Backend is not running on the mobile phone or web browser, it's running in some server. This server for sake of simplicity we will call it "Cloud" (You might have heard of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc., but there are tons of others).
To summarize: Frontend interacts with Backend, Backend runs in Cloud!
How Frontend and Backend Interacting?
Think of Frontend and Backend like two houses and both houses have a telephone, those telephones are connected with a wire. That's how they interact? Just telephone is not always going from your house to your friend's house, but your voice is somehow reaching your friend traveling various paths. Frontend and Backend also interact over Internet.
An optional concept:
If you want to be specific! There are protocols developed to make this possible, the most famous one is "HTTP". Basically, your frontend makes an "http call" to backend which is running in cloud. And your backend responds back to frontend.
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What we do?
We started developing web and mobile applications around 2011, have done freelancing for couple of our friends and their contacts. During first 4 years we have developed applications which solved problems across domains like manufacturing, construction, sports, entertainment. At that point we were only 2 developers. Soon we realized that there is a problem - "Domain Experts" who are not from Tech require a team who can give attention, commitment and passion to stand with them while they build their ideas, find new problems. The other option for them is to create a tech team which has one big prerequisite of finding a Tech guy at co-founder level.
In 2016, we started Betalectic to solve these problems at a bigger scale. After solving multiple types of problems of different domains, we are able to say, what we do is this:
- We design & build full-stack web and mobile applications. This includes frontend, backend, deploying them to cloud.
- We maintain and support these applications over long-term (think years)
- We build API only solutions
- We participate in end-to-end product development lifecycle (PDLC), which we will define in another chapter
- We help in turning ideas into businesses
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