3 business cases where software development gives you traction

As technologists we always whiteness-ed discussions like these:

"Have you considered Scala? It's Object Oriented and it overcomes a lot of Java's shortcomings!"

"Have you heard of the new xyz Google plug-in?"

"We don't like Windoze, we are open source developers!"

All these are fine discussions between developers but the business does not care. They want results. They want product delivered fast and with great quality. They want paying customers. They want great customer support and outstanding responsiveness to issues. And, more important, they want to understand why and how your solution will help their business.

So how we as developers tailor our day-to-day approaches to fuel business growth? In this blog I will discuss three real world scenarios.

#1 Affiliate marketing and payment system 

This company is a start-up running an outstanding Content Management initiative on a full stack platform with a full blast database, a sophisticated users management system, a responsive website and two mobile applications.

They have an opportunity for a participation in an affiliate marketing program ran by a national company. The national company is restrictive/controlling and they are imposing cumbersome leads generation and payments requirements. The leads will basically be generated from their site, their site has to process the payment for subscriptions and well then they will give us access to the lead so we can register the user with our website. Subsequent users (subordinated to a user they registered) registered directly with our website will have to re-directed back to their site for payment processing and a commission will be cut.

While the opportunity is good, coding for such a functionality is not straight forward and security mechanisms will raise the price of the ticket item for software development services.

Instead of pushing for a sale in what it could mean more of hassle for both our customer and us, we recommended working with other companies who do it right: will just send us the lead and let us process the payment and cut their commission from there.

This is a good example of a situation where, no matter of the technology, implementing a solution would not make business sense.

#2 Plug-in for Indiegogo campaign

Another start-up is running a crowd funding campaign. They designed an attractive Indiegogo package for a niche / affinity based social media solution. They need to have people contributing through Indiegogo and getting their perks for their contributions- which are basically different levels of subscriptions to the service and marketing materials from the company such as tshirts and hats. They need us the programmers get their mail addresses for them to be able to ship the product.

Everything is fine. Just that Indiegogo does not have an API for 3rd parties to work with. On top of that business requirements are that the company's store has to allow for artifacts purchases directly from the store as well.

This is another example where the technology that you use to implement the business requirements matters less. What matters more is the approach to plug-in Indiegogo's code into your site's code. So it's a work flow issue more than anything. You basically have to simulate an automatic login into Indiegogo, grab the transactions of the day & the tokens generated with them and pass them to the company's web store so people who contributed to the campaign get access to the system and get their tshirts shipped out.

#3 Mobile ready real estate document generation system

A local well established luxury real estate agency is looking to implement a custom document generation and management system to assist different parties involved in a real estate closing. These would be standard docs involved in a real estate transaction like sales contracts, disclosures, property appraisals, legal docs etc.

There are of course similar solutions on the market but they all lack different features that this realty would like to see: i.e. they do not have mobile support, they do not take social media logins, they lack certain stats and reporting capabilities.

While we were analyzing hard to propose a solution and we were all spinning our heads off talking databases, responsive design and mobile apps the client had a very simple and candid question: "What can we do better than these guys?" (they were talking about their competition that was already using a similar product).

The answer in this case was in our ability to support formal real estate docs generation from all kinds of devices including mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. The customer was very happy with that answer and we immediately understood that getting too much into the technical jargon would have hurt the deal rather then helping it.

This is a good example where you as a developer know how to talk your client's language.

Make it a great day!

Adrian
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com