Make Product Engineering Work Harder
Product engineering is changing. Because software now plays such a critical role in digital transformation, product engineering is now a strategic task.
Effective product engineering ensures that digital applications are fit for purpose and help users work more productively. For customer-facing software, quality is essential to ensure that customers have a satisfactory experience when they use a product.
Product engineering therefore focuses on key aspects of performance, including the user interface, functionality and accessibility. Integration with other applications and services is also important, while high levels of security are vital, particularly for businesses subject to compliance. Software must also be engineered to operate across a number of different desktop and mobile devices and platforms to support anywhere, anytime, any device working.
Scope of Product Engineering
Product engineering services work at a number of different levels. For businesses with existing software or legacy products, specialists can re-engineer or upgrade them to take advantage newer technologies that can transform performance and functionality. Upgrading helps to increase the lifecycle of existing products and improve return on investment.
Product engineeers also help businesses develop new products, increasing levels of innovation or enabling them to enter new markets. Consultants begin by assessing existing software to identify areas for improvement or opportunities to create new products that meet changing needs or fill a gap in the market.
Product engineers work with in-house teams to develop specifications for new products and assess their suitability for existing on-premise or cloud infrastructures. They use agile techniques to create rapid prototypes for evaluation by IT operations, users and customers. The feedback enables engineeers to carry out any modifications early in the development process.
Rapid Development
As detailed development continues, the team uses DevOps techniques to create iterative releases, using automated testing processes to continually develop, test and release new versions. If the new product is part of a long-term plan, the engineering team produces a product roadmap to ensure that future developments are in line with the original strategy.
The development process is highly automated, helping to reduce overall timescales and ensure the new product is quickly into productive use or earning revenue. Before release the team carries out further evaluation to confirm compliance with any industry or statutory regulations.
Access Engineering Specialists
The increasing complexity of product engineering and its critical role in digital transformation mean that many businesses are now using the services of specialist software product engineering consultancies to supplement their own resources and reduce development lead times.
Using external services gives businesses access to specialist expertise in a wide range of software applications. Product engineering specialists have developed tools and processes that enable them to develop quickly by using high levels of automation.
This helps businesses release higher quality products and services at a faster rate. It may also reduce development costs compared with in-house manual methods. Product engineering specialists can also customize commercial business applications to meet specific business needs and integrate with enterprise systems.
Find Out More
If you would like to know more about our product engineering services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.