How to manage your digital product delivery in a timely fashion
Digital Product delivery is complex and challenging, but also very rewarding. You get to create wonders that can be enjoyed by millions of people all over the world! However, creating the product is only half of your responsibilities; you must also deliver it to your customers in a timely fashion.
How do we make sure we meet this goal? How do we manage our digital product delivery in a timely fashion? This article will tell you how we approach this dilemma at Xyo and what we learned along the way.
First things first: let’s define “timely fashion”
What does delivering in a timely fashion… wait, what is it exactly that we’re trying to achieve here? What does “delivering in a timely fashion” actually mean? We need to define what we’re talking about here.
Our goal: “To deliver new versions of the product without inconveniencing our customers.”
Let’s break this statement down and inspect it to get a better idea of what we really want to achieve. Let’s ask ourselves these questions: What kind of inconvenience are we trying to avoid? Can you think of any other ways to measure “timely fashion” without just measuring how long it takes? How can we keep track of all the different versions while avoiding customer confusion?
1. Avoiding inconvenience is the easiest way to convey that delivering in a timely fashion means: making sure that new versions don’t introduce bugs or crashes for our customers.
2. The only real alternative would be measuring how many customer complaints we receive regarding a new version. I’m not completely against this measurement, but it would be more insight on the quality of our product as a whole and direct feedback on a particular new feature.
3. We can track all versions by keeping them in their own directory under the main directory for each app.
4. We can track all versions by putting each new version in its own directory under the main directory of the app.
5. We can ask customers to manually type in their version number on our upgrade webpage so we know which ones they are using.
6. We can put each new version in its own directory under the main directory for each app and track them there.
7. We could put out a different build with no new features that only includes bug fixes, but this would reduce sales, since customers might assume that there’s nothing new or exciting coming very soon (which would be true).
8. Each time we create an amazing new feature, it needs to include some other amazing thing you’ve never seen before to make sure you actually use it (otherwise you’d just keep using the old version).
9. We could create a server that tracks what versions our customers are on and then updates them when there’s an available upgrade. This is very expensive though, since we would need to purchase each customer’s IP address (they’re not all in one central location like they used to be), and we don’t scale well with volume.
10. If we can’t afford to do any of these options right now, we could put out an ad campaign letting everyone know that this feature exists, and people will come running back and buy it again. But I wonder if sales will go down as soon as word gets around; wait a minute–isn’t that what we’re trying to do here?
All of these options are out there, and all of them have a certain cost that must be taken into account. This is not a decision that can be lightly made without taking the entire picture into account. Your ISP’s actions, your customer base–who knows what other variables might apply? But take heart, you CAN make this decision! And the key to it all is in asking yourself this one pivotal question: What impact would each possible solution have on my user base?
Thus digital product delivery in a digital product management timely fashion is the key to it all, for this is what defines your company. Sure, you can do other things too–but without users you have nothing. Fans are great and everything, but they don’t pay your bills–acquiring them does not put food on the table. The digital product delivery, Chisel, is your lifeblood, and it is passed from you to the users who make up your user base.
So what you want to do–what we want you to do–is find a solution that works for both of you, where us peons (the user base) get our digital goods as quickly as possible after release and can enjoy them, while at the same time your company gets to continue existing. We may not always be able to meet halfway; there might be times when one or another party feels strongly about their position on a particular issue. But in general, when these things are sorted out before release, everyone is happy.
