Technology product companies have cut their spending due to market changes in 2020. The challenges caused by COVID-19 made them realign their product engineering and outsourcing strategies in 2021. Because of this, product engineering service providers built engagement and pricing models according to new expectations from technology product companies. Now, the economy and the market have embarked on the path to recovery. Product companies and service providers have innovated to provide fail-safe, transformed products to the end customers.
Here are the top five trends we have seen in Product Engineering that are likely to continue in 2021:
- High Availability Products – The crisis made many companies switch operations from physical to virtual. Most companies achieved the same within a short period by moving their infrastructure to the cloud. The COVID-19 crisis has been a crucial reason for many companies to adopt a digital transformation. With situations like lockdown and social distancing, technology product companies have to adopt high availability, fail-safe strategies to ensure the customer gets a consistent product experience 24/7.
- Failsafe and Enhanced Security – Going digital was seen as an opportunity by hackers. Many small and big instances took place to take advantage of digitalisation. Technical architects and CTOs put security on the priority list to give confidence to customers. The increased number of digital customers and the higher volume of transactions needed enhanced protection of data. Technology product teams have improved steps and authentication processes, providing much-needed information security and a user-friendly experience.
- Must have Features (AI, Mobile, Virtual Payment, Encryption) – Many technology product companies have AI, Mobile, Virtual Payment, and Information Security as a future part of product releases. With COVID, most of the processes were made digital, making these features a must-have. This also impacted service providers, as they had to ensure the company’s required skill set and resources are available.
- Controlled Cost and flexible Delivery – Technology product companies expected a reduced billing rate with additional expectations from the service provider because of cost control pressure. The work for many offshore services providers increased but with an expectation of better cost. Service providers were able to balance the cost per resource against an increase in demand. Many service providers had to take additional tasks and work with the same expenses. However, both technology product companies and service providers saw this as a WIN-WIN situation. Somewhere, large service providers could not meet the expected cost and had to lose business to medium and small service providers who could provide the best services at an affordable price.
- Enhanced Productivity with Distributed and Remote work – COVID had an enormous impact on technology product companies. Against the initial shared risk of reduced focus and productivity due to the need to work from home, we saw improved productivity. Teams were much more motivated, comfortable, and confident in their jobs, completing them within time and before time. Many resources added value by going beyond what was expected. Many technology companies have shown an indication to continue the work from home model at least partially. It is a good sign for global product engineering services providers to attract more customers and technology product companies.
zCon Solutions: We are a 13-year-old IT services company based out of Pune City-India. We work as a tech partner with start-ups, SMEs, and enterprises, and offer a range of engagement models such as turn-key projects, extended-teams, IT staffing, and IP development through our cost-effective, flexible engagement models.
We have a team of 120+ developers, designers, and architects working on emerging technologies such as PHP, C#, .Net Core, Frontend (JS) AngularJs, React Js, React Native, Node.js, Python, Cloud (Azure & AWS), Mobility, Oracle, Pl/SQL, DevOps, Analytics, and many more.
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