The one-hour that was spent discussing this topic during our Producteering teleconference on April 30th was definitely not sufficient; we managed to only uncover what it takes to build a great product and not discuss at length about each of the identified areas.

One important factor that evolved in the discussion was the shift towards Agile Development methodologies. This allows product companies to bring in their customers early in the cycle and the moment you start listening to them, the probability of making the product a success becomes much higher.
Having a customer advisory board that would provide inputs for the product was also discussed at length. This way you bring in customer perspectives, and add this to the market research and the multiple conversations with different target segments. This will stand a product company in good stead to bring out a great product that is adopted by users and that brings in revenue as well.

Innovation as a key to being a market differentiator was also discussed and how easy or difficult it is in different spaces. One of the factors that all the speakers agreed upon was that innovation is far easier in a start-up environment as opposed to an enterprise environment. The impact of innovation in consumer internet space was compared with enterprise software space as well.

In the enterprise software space, the biggest portion of the problem exists in usability and it gives nightmares to the end-users. Very few enterprise companies trouble themselves with interaction design, visual design and usability testing.

The biggest Achilles heel identified for software product companies was their unwillingness to say no to customizations from their customers, as they need to rope in cash, especially when they are small. This effectively changes the landscape that they play in and they turn into a custom software development shop.

These are points that were discussed during this call, and it was unfortunate that we ran out of time. We plan to have a few more teleconference sessions on the same topic.

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