{"id":14264,"date":"2021-09-17T15:36:31","date_gmt":"2021-09-17T12:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/?p=14264"},"modified":"2025-08-11T13:20:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T10:20:19","slug":"product-improvements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/product-improvements\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Guide on How to Make Product Improvements"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Bringing a product to the market and attracting the first customers are important milestones. Some would say, though, that this is just when the fun begins.<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Startups, established businesses, and even huge corporations constantly innovate and improve their products. They try to gain a competitive advantage, distinguish themselves from competitors, or just make their clients happy. Whatever the motivations, being able to pick the right product improvements<\/strong> and delivering them on time is a crucial factor for building successful products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"products<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What is product improvement?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Product improvement is the process of enhancing existing features<\/strong> of a product or implementing new functionalities<\/strong>. Typically, its aim is to provide more value to existing users or generate more signups among new customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why improve products?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In reality, businesses can have many different reasons for introducing improvements. They want to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Be viable.<\/strong> When the key features of your product<\/a> don\u2019t work as expected, users get frustrated. If they\u2019re patient, they can endure a lot, especially if they\u2019ve had prior positive experiences with the products. But if patience isn\u2019t exactly their strongest trait, a few critical errors or 404s here and there will quickly send them into the arms of your competitors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such users are nearly impossible to re-engage. They also hurt your company\u2019s reputation, spreading their negative feelings on review sites and discouraging their peers from signing up. And the more complex a product, the more likely failures are to occur. For that reason, it\u2019s worth investing in the product quality from the early days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep up with the times<\/strong>. Technologies age quite rapidly and even the most robust solutions will require an update in the future. Users\u2019 requirements grow, old technologies are phased out, and brand new ones appear. As more and more sophisticated devices and systems are developed, performance tends to suffer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than only react to failures, smart companies act proactively and upgrade their technology or codebase as new options become available. Even when they don\u2019t face immediate dangers, they realize that running on an outdated infrastructure can seriously derail their future plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Explore new opportunities.<\/strong> Healthy businesses always grow. Once the critical issues are addressed, they have more resources at hand to explore new directions. They can develop horizontally, adding new features or expanding the existing ones. This way, they can attract more customers and improve the value that the existing users get from using a tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Successful businesses also choose to deliver improved products vertically, exploring different directions, markets, approaches, constantly expanding their portfolio. It\u2019s not always the question of money \u2013 new directions can help improve the image of the company, attract quality talent, and engage the team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ll explore the pros and cons of vertical and horizontal upgrades further down the text<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep their customers happy.<\/strong> It always feels good being a user of a product that keeps adding new features and getting better. It feels even better when companies listen to their customers and implement features that are desired by the user community. It generates a lot of promoters for the business \u2013 people who stay with a company during the good and the bad times and advocate on its behalf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally, it makes no sense to implement whatever is most requested on user forums and push into the backlog of each new suggestion from the community. We\u2019ll touch more on balancing user and business goals in the following chapters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Continuous product improvement \u2013 why and how?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Every growing company wants to attract new clients, generate more income from the existing ones or simply build an enthusiastic community around their brand. As a result, they continuously improve their products and address different needs of a business with each iteration. Deployment of one feature opens the door for new improvements to be introduced. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This approach in lean technology is known as continuous product improvement<\/strong> and is often referred to as Kaizen<\/strong> (from the Japanese kai \u2013 “change”, zen \u2013 “good”). It was popularized in Japan in the 20th century and led to the incredible growth of many Japanese enterprises, Toyota being a textbook example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A healthy company never stops making things better. Virtually, it can also never get to the point where there\u2019s nothing else to improve. If it does, it\u2019s more likely a sign of stagnation rather than a major achievement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But having lots of ideas in a backlog is just the very first step. The real value for a company comes from the ability to choose the right ones and extract as much value from them, both for the customers and the company. Here, it\u2019s worth keeping in mind the following principles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Focus on the company goals \u2013 don\u2019t try to improve everything<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As a business, you certainly have some long-term goals. You want to reach a certain user count or gain a certain market share. You want to cross with ease through another financial milestone or establish yourself as a go-to place for [you choose].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The improvements you set out to implement should be aligned with these goals. If the goal is to reach 10,000 users by the end of the year, your efforts ought to be focused on generating new signups. If you\u2019re losing users at an alarming rate because feature X underperforms (and you have the data to prove it), prioritize the improvements in this particular area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While deploying these updates, maintaining fast and reliable product performance is crucial for a seamless user experience. Developers on macOS can use macos ftp command line<\/a> to efficiently manage file transfers, ensuring smoother deployments and better server management that will prevent performance bottlenecks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you actively listen to users and monitor their behavior using a social media tracker<\/a>, you certainly have tons of ideas for future product improvements. Realistically, you won\u2019t be able to deliver at least some of them. And by the time you get to some others, they won\u2019t be relevant anymore, or the priorities will have changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Align your short-term plans with your long-term goals and only add to the product roadmap<\/a> the items that make the most sense at a given time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Make your goals SMART<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Setting the right goals makes prioritizing improvements a lot easier. When developing products at Railsware, we like to use a simple method aptly named SMART. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know it\u2019s a bit ancient and you\u2019ll see it recommended in 95% of product development articles, but there\u2019s a reason for it: it\u2019s very simple to implement, and it actually works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMART is an abbreviation that makes up a set of five principles that each goal should follow. It should be:<\/p>\n\n\n\n