5 Software Redesign MISTAKES By Software Companies!

Healthy Developer

Are you getting ready to redesign a new version of a digital product with software? Avoid the top 5 software redesign mistakes by software companies I see made all too often.

#5 – Focusing On Current Customers

It’s tempting to focus on what current customers of the product have wanted at the expense of NEW customers. If the goal of a redesign is growth, it makes sense to do market research and look at the product with an open mind. Do new customers have completely different needs than current customers do?

#4 – Trying To Include All Features Of Prior Version

Many companies spend too much budget and time trying to design a product that does everything the prior product did. A redesign is the perfect point in a product’s life cycle to look at it with a fresh set of eyes before making a reinvestment. Throwing off the shackles of the existing product’s feature set might be exactly what your team needs to envision a dramatically more compelling, simpler, and BETTER product for the market.

#3 – Budgeting Too Little For Marketing

As a digital software product becomes more established, many teams focus too much on the engineering side of the product. Is it possible that you might be better off budgeting a larger percentage of the investment in the redesign towards marketing?

If you’re not doing Facebook advertising, Google Adwords, or Instagram posting to reach today’s audience you could be missing out on an extremely effective way to reach customers that you used to via a different source.

#2 – Failing To Consider A Rebrand

Though the benefit of an existing brand name and marketing message can be an advantage, depending on the age of your product and the needs of new customers, it may make sense to rebrand. This allows a team psychologically to detach from the prior product more wholly and look at the new version through a completely different lens. Might this be a strategy your company could use to bring life back to a product that’s no longer as compelling and exciting for the market as it once was?

#1 – Failure To Establish Measurable Outcomes

The biggest and most common of the software redesign mistakes I see made is unfortunately the failure to truly establish easily measurable outcomes for success. As a project gets underway, unless design decisions were made to accomplish easily measurable goals, it’s easy for the team and management to lose sight of the purpose and simply look at the redesign as a “project” to be completed. It’s a huge opportunity to reach some exciting goals for everyone, and it provides cause for celebration to all those who were involved as they discover what the market wants!

You can also watch this episode on YouTube.

Related resources:

• How To A/B Software Development To Find What Customers Value

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