Growth Strategies for Software Companies

Eventually every one wants their small business to grow into a big business, right? If that’s true, then learning which big business growth strategies might work for you, more so in case of software companies where competition grows exponentially and the changing technology makes it even more difficult to keep up.

The industry’s booms and busts make growth an essential ingredient in value creation and difficult to understand. To date, little work has been done on the importance of revenue growth for software and Internet. Here are five growth strategies that small businesses should consider. Keep in mind that not every strategy will be right for all situations but some of these might offer an opportunity for your business.

1. Growing your Product

Software companies can get stagnant very fast if the management lacks the vision to keep innovating. This usually spells doom for a software company. Many companies are solely dependent on one product for a major part of their revenue. Usually, it is this product that the company came into the market with and made its name. A very successful product, which could have been at the pinnacle of the innovation at one point can also turn out to be a bottleneck for a firm later on.

2. Product Management Strategy

Most technology companies have a product management department serving as the “voice of the customer” and helping to better understand market needs. This function typically generates an extensive roadmap of new products and enhancements, but is this product management really being used strategically? For example, what is the product strategy that is driving roadmap priorities? And how is the product strategy linked to the company’s overall strategy?

The Strategic Product Plan

The essential goal of a product plan should be to ensure that a product is built that delivers some business value to a specific set of customers in order to meet certain financial goals based upon a defined corporate strategy. Successive plans should increase that product’s effectiveness in doing so. As discussed earlier a product plan describes the market opportunity (industry trends), profiles the target customers, specifies pricing, identifies the financial goals, indicates the key priorities for development and enhancement, and provides a roadmap for delivery.

 

 

3. Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Not all good ideas turn out into great products. There are quite a few products that fail in the market due to a variety of reasons. This makes it important for a company to strategize and brain storm to make sure its new product is not a failure. How do they find out if a product is going to be a hit in the market? And more importantly how do we find that out by investing the minimum amount possible. That is where the MVP strategy comes in. The concept of MVP is getting acceptance throughout in the area of Product Development and is largely used by start ups, although it could be immensely helpful for new product design and development in large organizations.

 

 

Strategies for MVP

• A survey for the likely features of the product.
• An email campaign to see the interest generated for the product.
• A website which shares resources, articles about the features and the benefits to the customers.