Skip to main content
Welcome to Deloitte

If we have selected the wrong experience for you, please change it above.

Perspective:
Perspective

How to enhance the product life cycle

Turning development challenges into opportunities

Each phase of the product development life cycle brings its own engineering challenges—as well as opportunities. A provider capable of navigating the process from start to finish can help you make the most of those opportunities, accelerating speed-to-market, optimizing processes at scale, and supplying critical but hard-to-fill talent spots.

Product engineering is more important—and complex—than ever before

Development is a complex and costly function. But, for a large tech company, the importance of keeping up an innovative product development function can’t be overstated. Today, it’s crucial for maintaining market advantage.

Working with an external provider can alleviate development issues and enhance the process—particularly in the ideation and maintenance stages—freeing up top engineering talent to focus on work that drives innovation. In addition to generally driving up productivity, collaboration can also contain costs and support the creation of experiences that deeply engage customers.

We’ve written about the value of using external resources to support innovation in product development. But how exactly would it work at various phases of the life cycle?

Product engineering support for enterprise customers

Enterprise customers of tech companies are contending with an increasing demand for more emerging solutions. With best-in-class products across the entire stack, a company like Alphabet is in a leading position to help enterprise customers navigate digital disruption and transformation. The challenge is to prioritize and execute the product roadmap based on customer needs.

What role does outside support play? Not only can an external provider use its industry knowledge to help create those roadmaps, but it can also help to integrate technology at the enterprise customer company.

Opportunities and challenges throughout the product life cycle

Below are common challenges that come up during the product life cycle, alongside the opportunities that an external provider can bring to each stage.

Ideation and design

UX research, rapid prototyping, solution architecture, business analysis, feature analysis, wireframing, business process engineering, human-centered product and experience design, proof-of-concept development, product strategy and governance.

  • Meeting the market’s demand for innovation calls for roles with advanced skill sets, which are difficult to attract and retain. Ideation activities like prototyping can also take top engineers away from their most valuable work—innovation.
  • What do customers want? What do sectors and industries want, as opposed to individual consumers? Tech companies must orient development priorities around both.
  • Designing products with the user at the center requires deep insight into users’ real needs.
  • Rapid prototyping, alongside other ideation activities, can allow you to “fail fast” and move forward to proof-of-concept development for new solutions, including both digital and physical products.
  • Deep customer research can uncover insights into user behavior, needs, and goals to shape the end-to-end customer journey. Expertise in industry verticals provides a close view into the specific needs of sectors.
  • Analyzing and visualizing data insights can quickly and effectively identify risk and drive business results.

Development

Digital and physical product development, custom app development (cloud native or on-premise), APIs and data platforms and integration, Agile and DevOps application modernization, predictive analytics and insights, AM/ML experiences and scale, modern data platforms, compliance

  • While contending with budget constraints, tech leaders expect a high return on development activities.
  • During the build phase, it’s important to build a bridge between design and development to ensure that outcomes meet ambitions.
  • Organizations also have to build and tailor applications to overcome complex integration challenges within the organization and with external partners, suppliers, and customers.
  • Use data to continuously iterate and improve products.
  • Scale with the added capacity to meet specific product goals or deadlines.

Testing, quality assurance (QA), and compliance

Automation, performance, security, accessibility, emerging methodologies (IoT, chaos engineering, etc.), data security

  • Tech companies are under pressure from global regulators to embed data protection, harm reduction, ethical use of AI, and sustainability into their products and solutions.
  • Ongoing testing and QA must be performed across the existing product portfolio—in addition to QA for new products.
  • Modern software solutions should be validated with a minimum viable product. Once target features are launched, they should be incrementally improved upon.
  • Testing of physical devices requires evaluating compliance of software in the pre-manufacturing phase, posing a challenge to digital teams that work on a different cadence.
  • Engineering for compliance is a chance to design products and solutions with security, data, and trust taken into consideration right from the start.
  • By relying on both humans and digital FTEs, modern testing leverages automation, robotics, AI, and ML to create efficiencies, increase speed-to-market, and enhance quality.

Launch, ongoing support, and continuous optimization

Commercialization, product operation, DevSecOps, customer support, product operation and support

  • Scaling and continuously improve the digital and physical products.
  • Maintaining support for and optimizing established products can place demands on the attention of top talent, conflicting with innovation-directed activities.
  • Real-time data upon launch can provide openings for optimization.
  • Operating and scaling systems using an analytical, real-time, data-based approach can ensure efficiency, agility, and continued productivity.

Choosing the right product engineering support for your organization

The right partner can not only alleviate pain points but also uncover opportunities to unlock value. With a long history of partnering with Alphabet to drive growth, innovation, and trust, Deloitte is uniquely poised to help:

• Deliver sustainable growth across priority businesses.

• Scale through innovation, drive efficiency, and embed long-term value across the organization.

• Advance sustainability, equity, and trust through our shared purpose and values.

With a breadth and depth of engineering capabilities, Deloitte is a global leader in software engineering. We bring:

• Modern engineering that drives velocity and builds future functionality.

• An engineering culture and mindset that attracts, grows, and retains top talent.

• End-to-end methods, tools, and frameworks for assembly of nearly any software solution.

• Next-gen custom development that is product-led, business outcome-focused, and DevSecOps-enabled.

• Deep vertical industry expertise across sectors, and global scale and reach.

• Strong alliances, including a 360-degree relationship with Google.

• Accountability to timeline and quality goals.

Want to learn more about what it’s like to partner with Deloitte? Read about our work with Alphabet and explore our capabilities.

The challenges of product engineering are ever evolving, but so are the opportunities. Deloitte provides a broad range of product engineering services designed intentionally with speed, efficiency, and reduced risk in mind. From developing a product strategy to translating that strategy into the cutting-edge engineering that takes your ideas to market, we have the experience and reputation to help you build your future.

Alphabet Product Engineering Services | Deloitte US

Did you find this useful?

Yes
No

Thanks for your feedback

Your feedback is important to us

To tell us what you think, please update your settings to accept analytics and performance cookies.

Need help updating cookies?

Get in touch

Chaithanya Kolar

Chaithanya Kolar

Quality Engineering Leader
+1 732 421 8714