By: Yatin Parwatkar, Product Owner, Canvas Resilience by LTIMindtree

Human tendency is to look for security and assurance in every aspect of our lives. Even when buying an item, we check the reviews, product quality, and durability. If you are about to buy a product that will be used for a long time, for example, a mobile phone, what aspects will you consider apart from the functional features like RAM, camera quality, battery life, and more? You’ll definitely consider reviews from previous buyers and the brand’s track record regarding reliability and after-sales services. Most likely, you’ll not consider a brand if you ever had a bad experience with it, no matter how good the features or how inexpensive the product is. On the other hand, if your experience was good, you’ll actively consider it even if it lacks a few features or is expensive. In this blog, we’ll explore the reasoning behind this behavior.

Customers are marketing partners

Product performance during a specific time matters a lot for building customer loyalty to any product, and it starts establishing a product or brand image. If a product fulfills our requirements every time, it gains our loyalty, which also gets transferred to the brand indirectly.

In another way, if the customer does not receive the desired output, it directly impacts the product image.

If user experiences are more positive, then it helps build a user base, and as soon as a critical mass starts using a product, demand for that product always remains on the higher side.

Product success is all about product availability and reliability. These two important factors help build customer trust for a product. If the product is available and not fully reliable or vice versa, it impacts the product image. It also affects the overall business and the organization’s brand value.

Going back to the mobile phone example, imagine that you shortlisted a product after considering the brand, features, price, and all other aspects. However, if the product is unavailable in your area or when you need it, you’ll find yourself returning to square one and restarting the search.

Considering these scenarios, a product owner and delivery team should be more focused on product performance with multiple combinations of real-time scenarios and how a product can sustain in uncertain conditions with negligible impact on performance.

Apart from product performance, a few of the points that add value and help to maintain customer trust are:

• After-sales service
• New upgrades or enhancement
• Quick customer support
• Warranty and guarantee schemes

These points add more value to product reliability. The moment a business starts fulfilling customers’ requirements and expectations in support of all the above factors, the product becomes a brand and, in turn, gets more publicity in the market.

Insurance vs. assurance

Customers always expect the amount invested in a product or service not to be wasted and give a good ROI. This is known as assurance expectations from the product. The best example is Apple vs. Chinese smartphones. Apple’s products provide quality and durability, whereas Chinese products are value for money. Customers expect maximum value from the product compared to the cost invested. This assurance can be delivered if you build your product by focusing more on real-time scenarios during the development phase.

Insurance comes into the picture post-actual consumption of the product, where if something fails, the insurer or the brand commits to providing a solution or resolving the challenges. This situation forces customers to wait while the issue is resolved and can drastically impact their business. Considering the value added to the product and customer benefits, the product should be designed and developed by focusing more on assurance rather than insurance.

Deliver with a proactive approach

As the above scenarios explain, product delivery is an art rather than a series of tasks. It depends on an organization’s understanding of its domain, business, customers, competitors, insurance vs. assurance, and product. It can easily build a product with a proactive approach if it’s completely aware of these five aspects. Products developed with this approach remain longer time in the market, as proved by many real-world examples. Many IT startups come into the market with innovative ideas, such as a performance monitoring tool, but a lack of knowledge in this area may bear huge losses. Conversely, organizations following the above theory and continuously learning become market leaders.

While considering all the above discussions on availability, reliability, assurance, and proactive approach, there’s a need for a one-stop solution. A solution that will assist you starting from your development phase and keep your product intact with all the above factors.

In today’s competitive world, software applications are the lifeline for everyone. Customers pay a lot for software and always look for secure, fast, and reliable solutions. There are many applications or software available as an alternative to each other. If any application does not perform or give results on time, we turn to other options. In turn, this impacts brand value and the customers’ trust factor.

We should have a system, e.g., a performance monitoring tool, to predict the risk and impact and provide preventive measures in advance.

In conclusion

The industry needs a chaos engineering and observability platform to simulate malicious attack environments and observe system behavior. This platform would help address application infrastructure issues, bottlenecks, and outage hotspots. The goal is to uncover application faults before they impact applications, increase availability, and reduce maintenance costs. Monitoring infrastructure utilization, such as CPU spikes, network latencies, and memory utilization, is also important to ensure application resilience and maintain the target Service Level Objective (SLO).

In addition to infrastructure monitoring, tracking each business transaction’s performance and response time is crucial. This requires a continuous performance monitoring tool that collects data points from infrastructure and business transactions, providing an observability module for both.

One such solution that meets these requirements is Canvas Resilience. It incorporates Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) with predictive analysis to help users take preventive measures before issues affect the overall business.
Know more about it by visiting: Canvas by LTIMindtree