It’s very disheartening to see the failure of the product on which you and your team worked hard for several months .All your hard efforts go in vain and you start losing confidence in your employees as while as yourself. Tough your product didn’t make a mark, there’s no doubt that you’ve learnt a lot from this disappointment and you’ll certainly take steps to prevent such a debacle in the future .In order to take these steps , you’ll need to analyze all the factors that contributed to this failure. No matter what you do, your analysis would always include one of the below or all the reason that contributed to the failure of your software product:-
3 key Reasons for the failure of a Software Product
- Poor Requirement Analysis:-This is the first and the most important phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). Output of this phase is supplied as an input to other phases of the life cycle … so you can imagine how important this phase is?. Your analysts/you may not have completely studied the clients (targeted markets) requirements AND business and gave an incomplete analysis to the designers of the software, the designers did their job of designing the software (Architecture, Models…etc) and gave it to the programmers who did their job of coding the Developed model …and without making the clients to test and give a review about your product … you launch the product in the market..You/your marketing team might successfully convince the people to try out your application …and when they use your product at their end …they discover that your software product doesn’t meet up the expectation of the business. And thus you eventually end up in a scenario of redesigning the application as per as clients requirement.. Thus, your developed software product can be simply considered as a failure.
- Poor Performance of the application :-When your software meets up to clients expectation and he/she happily uses it for a few days and then he/she suddenly discovers that the due to some reasons the software shut downs automatically , takes too much time to load data, has some bugs and reports it to you .This is confusing situation for you as you , as the client/end-user was the one who gave the final nod after testing .Now, you/your development team has to fix the problem in the application and you re-launch(All the customers using this software may face the same problem as the one discovered) the software for its customers using this software .Thus , the earlier version of the re-launched software is certainly a failure .
- Poor Marketing:-Marketing is very important for any business. Poorly marketed world-class software products are nothing but a disaster. There are many marketing techniques and you/your marketing team may have made use only of the few techniques due to negligence and over-confidence. This eventually turns out to be a debacle. After discovering that your software failed to establish a mark in the market due to poor marketing strategies, you re-build your marketing strategies and re-launch the product with a better marketing strategy.
I discovered these 3 reasons from my personal marketing experiences. You can even add your reasons for the failure of a software product as a comment.
