The Ultimate Guide to Enterprise Software Development

Evaluate Your Technology: Find the Gaps and Fill Them

Let’s take a moment and regroup; assess where we are in the development process:

1. You know what you have.
2. You know what you need.

What’s next? Simple steps. Where are you now? Where do you want to go?

You did the work to dig deep, now find the gaps in your assets and processes so you can fill them to get to where you want to be. PlatformPlus® gives your development team new capabilities without needing to add staff. As you make the assessment of what you need and how that differs from where you are now, the gap may seem enormous and the lift you need too great. But it doesn’t have to be!

The automated, pre-built plumbing components within PlatformPlus® will give you a solid foundation to build upon to get to where you want to be. Our architecture is modular, flexible, and scalable; we can provide you with a bigger lift in development velocity, quality, and longevity at the same price as hiring a single senior software developer.

The combination of the battle-tested runtime components in PlatformPlus® and its advanced model-driven automation tools remove a huge amount of work from your developers’ plates, letting them focus their efforts on innovation rather than maintenance–on value-added features rather than plumbing and drudge work. At every step, they have access to and the support from our software architects and heavy-lift engineers who guide and advise them on how to use PlatformPlus® to maximum effect.

The fact of the matter is that you can’t always out-hire internal inefficiencies. BUT, you can do more, faster, by teaming up with Modularis and letting PlatformPlus® do the heavy lifting for you. PlatformPlus® allows you to seamlessly fill the gaps without having to cobble together tech, or hire new developers, engineers and architects. Our team and our tech will fit seamlessly to fill the gaps. We will help you set goals, finalize your strategic product roadmap, and keep everyone operating efficiently and in line with business objectives to help your company be more competitive. 

It All Comes Back To The Roadmap

After all the assessments, evaluations, and deep dives, you always come back to where you started: the Strategic Product Roadmap. We can’t emphasize the importance of this step enough! Engineers are too close to the products, and too distant from customers and the market, to see clearly enough to be strategic. The roadmap is what brings strategy and development together into one neat little package.

The roadmap will show each deliverable and how it directly supports previously defined business objectives. If your deliverable can’t be tied directly to a positive business impact, it doesn’t belong on the roadmap. The roadmap should go out for 12 to 18 months, and be updated quarterly; always defining objectives and sequencing deliverables to support them. Understand that plans can, and likely will, change. The reviews and adjustments are there to allow you to make decisions consciously and on your own terms, rather than being forced into them. 

With your bird’s-eye view of the upcoming months and year, coupled with buy-in from your C-suite and your team, you will be planning changes weeks and months in advance. This means you get the opportunity to plan developer capacity and prioritize the most important fixes and features first. Your developers will have time to build assets that can be used again and again, driving up ROI, and getting you away from the break-fix mentality that costs you money and development time.

What makes the product roadmap work so well is the buy-in at all levels. It’s not just the C-suite throwing down demands, and it’s not developers adding in too many bells and whistles. It’s the team making decisions together! Business development owns the roadmap, and your business development team should consist of people like your head of sales, head of marketing, CEO, CTO, working in lockstep with your lead software engineering team lead(s). Your business leaders will drive the roadmap at a higher level, while the engineering teams will break down business objectives into tech milestones and the minutiae of details that come along with them. 

And, you don’t have to go it alone! Modularis can help you map out your future success with a workshop that includes input from 25-year software development veterans. Our experts will help you map your software product vision, getting you on the road to a market-ready release quicker than you could have imagined possible.

Execution and Accountability

No matter how well-thought-out any plan or strategy is, it will either come together or come apart based on how well it’s executed. And the key to flawless execution is clear accountability for all players involved, including yourself. Build it right. Build it fast. Build it to last. Simple words, but they define a complicated and important job. 

By helping your R&D team understand why they are working on a project, and how it aligns with your overall company goals, you give your engineers a complete understanding of the impact their development efforts will have on the business and your customers. They are going to build it right. Providing them with the tools, automation, and components they need will let them build it fast. Building upon a well defined, battle-tested, clean, consistent, and fully supported architecture that is well maintained and regularly upgraded means they can have the confidence to know they are building it to last. There is accountability on both sides of the table here, and it is all outlined in the roadmap. 

Instead of setting up your developers to impress you with their ability to put out fires, you are letting them know that they will impress you most by executing a plan that keeps those fires from starting in the first place.