Making Your Way In The Competitive Tech Market

The tech market is ever growing and there’s always more room for innovation, creativity, and those who know how to provide a solution that business owners are clamouring for. However, it’s also an incredibly competitive market, so you need to be ready to run the gauntlet if you plan on getting into it. Here are a few tips on standing out and excelling in a competitive tech market, no matter what kind of software or solutions you provide.

Make sure clients understand what you do

Ever tried telling someone what your job is, only for their eyes to glaze over and their will to live escape their body? That happens just as much when clients have to listen to tech solution providers who don’t know how to describe their services intuitively. Even those who come specifically looking for the kind of services you provide won’t understand them as technically as you do. You don’t have to assume that they’re idiots, just make sure you avoid overloading them with jargon in your software marketing and in your pitches. Ask them how familiar they are with a concept and introduce it if necessary.

Focus on intuitiveness and ease

The same concept of making your business easy to understand should go for not just the marketing, but the actual solutions and products themselves. Take the KISS principle seriously and keep it simple, stupid. Especially in software as a service, what your solution provides should be self-explanatory. The features and design involved should be simple, clean and incredibly intuitive as opposed to complex and full of depth. Not only does this mean that people can learn to love what you’re offering all the sooner, it also means that your marketing can then more easily focus on explaining the benefits of using your solution, rather than having to explain the different features that your customers have to learn about.

Set clear expectations

Now that we have talked a little bit about how to position your product and brand to make it a little more marketable, we also need to look internally. Your team, how you manage them, and how you organize your work is going to play a key role in how well you can develop high-quality tech solutions that are always, always going to be the core of your success. Ensuring productivity and a clear direction for development is a part of that. One of the ways to do that is to set clear expectations for the development team. Everyone should be one the same page when it comes to when and how they do sprints, how testing and documentation is carried out, and how long team members should spend on blockers before seeking help.

Find the right development model structure

When it comes to your workload, clear planning and communication is vital. There are a range of different models, each preferred by different teams, including the spiral model of software development for instance. Which you choose isn’t as important as the fact that you choose and communicate one, allowing your team members to see, at a glance, where they are, what objectives they have to meet in the short-term, the long-term plan they are involved in, and the timescale expected for the project. Without a good development model, it’s easy for your team to be stuck working for one part of the project for too long, slowing your ability to deliver and update your solutions.

Deliver meaningful feedback

Software development, even as a member of a team, can feel isolating at times. Most of the time, you’re working on your own patch of turf, so to speak, alongside others who are working on different patches of turf. As such, to make sure that plans are on rails, schedules are going as planned, and that your team’s talents are being utilized, it’s important to both seek and give feedback. What could they have done better? What did they like about that last part of the project? What should check when doing that kind of work again? Only through feedback can you continuously improve, which means that your solutions will also continuously improve, leading to greater success amongst your market.

Ensure commitment to customer success

You are going to find very few target markets that are as likely to offer feedback (positive or negative), are as engaged with a product, and are as passionate as tech consumers. For one, they’re simply more technologically savvy in general, so they know when to get online and to raise a fuss. As such, great customer service isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s something that you have to invest your time in. Your solutions are going to have to prove themselves, so you need to ensure customer success so that you have case studies and positive word of mouth to help support your offerings. A lack of great customer support for a tech company is likely to see customers moving on to other options.

Find your network

If you’re a woman in tech, then few things can help you grow as fast as finding other women in tech. From helping to train up and inspire the next generation of girls currently pursuing tech careers to recruiting fresh new talent, networking can be a very real investment in the quality of worker in your company. However, it also helps to support the tech ecosystem when companies share resources, platforms, and potential leads. You can exchange ideas, form professional relationships, and build lifelong friendships by finding others who are trying to make it on the same path as you.

The tips above are largely designed to apply to teams that provide software as a service solutions. However, there’s no doubt that they can just as easily fit others in the tech market. However, most important of all is to not stop reading here. The tech market is constantly changing, so you should be constantly learning how to adapt and grow in it, as well.

Photo by Eugene Chystiakov from Pexels

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