Skip to main content

Maintaining multiple versions of a product

A product team , when it has more than one client, faces a challenge when it has to maintain multiple versions of the product.

Typically the implementation team would have made some customizations for every installation for the product. However, when they release a new update, they struggle to make it work for all the products since there are customizations and the new update might not be compatible.

There are several considerations that a product manager needs to take while deciding on the product strategy.

Saas versus Installation

Having a saas product makes it easier for the engineering team to push updates. If it is a installer distribution, There are the team will face challenges with distribution. Compatibility is also an issue.

The biggest issue however, from the user perspective, is data migration from the previous version to current version. The best way out of this is to make it a service as well. You can decide whether you want the customer to pay for that or not

Update versus Upgrade

There is no one correct definition for either of these 2 terms.

For the current product team that I am working, we have decided the following:

Upgrade: Any introduction of a major functional feature. This would involve significant changes in the product and there typically would be a need for the users to be retrained. Further there would be a need for data migration from earlier versions to current versions.

Update: This is a minor update that would be addressing smaller sets of feedback or any defects in the product. This would typically be handed out free. There would be no need for data migration and all the data that used to work in the previous version should work in the current version as well.

When we release an upgrade, we have to be careful on how many users are ready to switch to the latest version

Support for older versions

When we release new versions, we also need to understand how much concurrent versions can be supported. Sometimes this could be a cost in itself.

To handle this issue, our product team has decided on the following:
  • We will always handle only 2-3 versions old
  • If a version has less than 5% users we will stop supporting it actively
  • In case there are users that are still in older versions, we will allow them to upgrade freely.
Why would we allow them to upgrade freely?

This is so because we have found that the cost of support is far more than the cost of the upgrade. Hence, we reduce the cost of support by allowing for free upgrade.

Frequency of Updates and Upgrades

The updates can be as frequent as possible. Right here we are thinking of around 4-6 weeks between updates.

Upgrades , however, need more time. We have currently not reached a stage of maturity to release an upgrade yet. Based on our initial plan, we plan to release an upgrade every 12-14 months.

Why is this important?

The upgrade frequency is important for the users for the following reasons:
  • It gives them a visibility of what is going to come and when
  • It ties well with their business calendar and the new upgrade satisfies their new business needs
With all these considerations, the product manager needs to be able to handle support for multiple versions of a product.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Counterfiet goods and the fledgeling e-commerce market places

India has a nascent and a very active market place. With good interest, the right climate for growth and right product mix, the indian retail marketplace seems to be going places. However, there are some alarming signals that seem to be ignored for growth that have a good chance of being dangerous to all the stakeholders involved. The issue I am talking about is the sale of counterfeit goods in all the indian market places. India has not had a history of strong Intellectual property rights. This time it is getting messier. The Indian marketplace model is very interesting and suits well to a country as diverse as India. The market place model floated by all the major e-railers suits the fact that the seller and the buyer can be connected for serving the needs for every day goods that are not necessarily covered by IP laws. India needs more effective IP laws since it is struggling with some products like traditional indian products that cannot be covered by IP versus modern produc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Organizational growth and turn over

Organisations need to grow. However, they should not grow for the sake of growth. That would be a virus. Orgs should not grow to survive as well. Orgs should grow with a purpose.
Post a Comment
Read more

Finding your target audience

The biggest task of the product manager is to find your target audience. Typically it is a very tight rope walk. You define it too narrowly and you would struggle to generalize the product later. You define it too broad and you would struggle to satisfy a lot of people and the product might not take off at all. There is this awesome post by Dave Mcclure on why Niche target segment works. Blog link here . What he says is mostly right and that is what we did as well. We did it mostly by accident. We had to define our niche because we could only talk to those kind of retailers and get data from them to start developing the data. It did have its upside. We were very clear on what we wanted to develop and we are slowly talking to retailers and adding more scenarios. As we are doing this, we are also talking to a slightly different set of retailers. This helps us incrementally build our product while also generalizing the existing features. In our case, we did not fin...
Post a Comment
Read more