AI for Product Design: Incorporate New Technologies to Your Products

Amid relentless technological evolution, digital transformation by itself is not the only thing companies need to maintain relevance in today’s market. Simply put, technology is evolving at such a rapid pace, that simply investing and learning about digital transformation through the latest innovation could bring more harm than good in this market.

You need to have a plan. You need to understand what new technologies are being used, and what’s being projected to be the most important ones in the market later. For example, AI product manager jobs are on the rise, with demand being extremely high. An Amazon survey suggests that these roles are paid 35% more than their peers. 

AI for product design and as an actual feature in your internal workflows and processes can be an excellent way of adding a competitive edge to your business, as can other new technologies like Generative AI. However these initiatives can be met with backlash and resistance from your current workforce if not handled properly. Not every internal team can handle the integration required to implement AI for product design or features.

In this article, we’ll be breaking down some key considerations you’ll need to make as a business to properly implement new technologies and AI into your product design workflow. This advice comes from the 20+ years of experience Teravision Technologies has accumulated as an agile nearshore software development company. We’ve been doing this for a while, helping companies who are struggling to properly define their product in a way that future proofs it for scale.

Our goal by the end of this article is to give you the key points you need to consider as a business to implement these technologies properly. Not every new technology is going to be the right fit for your business, regardless of how trendy it seems to be. But after this article, you’ll understand if AI for product design or as a product feature, for example, is something that could add value to your business or not, and execute on those hypothesis. AI for product design will be the main example we’ll be using as it’s our primary area of expertise for consultancy and mentoring. Though, this can apply to anything related to emerging technologies now and in the future.

The 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Including Emerging Technologies like AI for Product Design

Each of these questions are aimed to put businesses in the right mindset to assess their needs, capabilities and the direction their taking to accomplish their needs. Every company will have a different set of needs and expectations, so the answers to these questions may differ. However, the intent remains the same for any business within any given industry that’s determined to become more technologically driven.

What are Your Business Goals?

As an agile nearshore software development company, our main focus is not just providing agile nearshore development, as the name implies. We are also focused on offering more of a mentoring and consultancy, with agile nearshoring as a base. As such, the first thing we consider for a project is the client’s business goals. What are they looking to accomplish? Are there any KPIs they prioritize over others? What expectations do they have when integrating specific technologies to their stack?

Like we’ve mentioned before, not every emerging technology is going to bring benefits for the company if implemented. So, the way to avoid the costly mistake of going in the wrong direction is to make sure to have your business goals in mind when developing them. This will ensure that the technologies you evaluate, and the projections you’ll be developing internally and monitoring straight from the market will be included in your deliberations.

What Do Your Users Need?

This seems like something obvious at first, but when you think about it, not many companies seem to develop their products with this in mind. For software companies especially, user needs are king. In a market of exponential growth and innovation, where the scope of competition can go beyond the confines of industry, making sure your software product can properly attend to the needs of your userbase can render your software product dead in the water, or successful.

In two previous articles, we talked about the different ways that ui and ux design benefit the product development process. This branch of software development is key for making sure their needs are properly met. From understanding the users journey throughout the products interface, to their perceptions on the functionality of the product. Finding a compromise between your business needs and the users own needs can help brin the next point to a satisfying conclusion.

What Technologies Can Help You Achieve Your Objectives?

After figuring out your needs and your users needs, it’s time to determine what emerging technologies are currently out there that can adjust to your reality. Part of our job as a nearshoring software development company is to translate those necessities discussed in previous points into roadmaps and workflows that allows clients to make smart decisions. This part will be discussed in the next question.

This may sound like a broken record, but not every emerging technology will bring benefits to your company or product portfolio. They may all be the answer to your needs and attend to your user’s needs, though the difficulty of integration may vary. Regardless of your reality, having yours and users needs in mind will help you realistically evaluate your options and figure out the best course of action for your company and products.

What Is Your Plan for Integrating New Technologies?

After determining what technologies you need to integrate into your business and products, now you have to formulate a plan. The question is, how do you even start developing that plan? Remember when we said nearshore software services like ours bring consultancy and mentoring to the equation? That’s where the roadmaps we mentioned before come into play. 

These roadmaps include the full scope of the development plan. From the team’s formation, each member’s responsibilities, the tech stack needed and the estimated timeline. However, the scope of these roadmaps and the documentation for the project are tempered by the recommendations we as a nearshore software outsourcing provider can bring to the table. From best practices that your internal team or other advisors may not have taken into consideration, to reiterating on the realities a client is currently facing and how those will impact the way their products or systems can integrate with emerging technologies. 

Some things you might need to consider when determining the way to integrate new technologies could be, but are not limited to:

• Current employee preparation to use these new technologies effectively
• Your current infrastructure; Would you be prepared for the influx of users that come from integrating these technologies? Can your team properly maintain your product with the additional technology included?
• Do your current workflows easily allow for more steps to be added when necessary?
• How will you be testing these integrations? What will be the procedure behind the documentation to come from these tests?

How Will You Spread That Knowledge to Your Team?

We talked about this point a bit in the previous question, but one of the key questions you need to ask yourself is how this new knowledge and set of competencies will be taught and distributed to your current talent base. As a nearshore software development company, we believe the inclusion of emerging technologies into workflows and products presents an opportunity to advance understanding and knowledge within a company’s work force. Leveraging this opportunity to increase the technological literacy of your staff is a crucial step towards making your company more competent in the field, and it helps technological innovation come easier to the team.

Testing and documentation will become crucial to your digital transformation process. This is the most direct form of imparting knowledge and skills to your team as you get closer to integrating your desired technology, as it combines experience and experimentation to provide a full hands on experience. Webinars, community knowledge, blogs, podcasts and others can also be sources for imparting knowledge. However, the single best way to make sure new technologies are implemented properly, such as AI for product design, is to have an agile nearshoring partner with a clear experience of helping companies understand emerging technologies as a whole to guide you throughout the entire software development process. 

Now that those points are out of the way, we hope you’re capable of fully understanding the questions you should be asking yourself when planning for digital transformation. The only question remaining is: are there any service providers that can help guide us through this process?

Integrate New Technologies with Teravision Technologies

We’ve mentioned this before, but Teravision Technologies is an agile nearshore software development company that has been in the market for over 20 years now. We’ve been helping companies that are struggling to develop their product properly, or are having issues in defining their product and where it should go. Contact us and we can lend you a hand with this and the development of your next software product through our nearshore software services, with specialized Latin American tale