Learn About Software Development
& Outsourcing Best Practices

Lighthouse is a free website quality auditing tool that you may already have installed on your laptop (and likely didn’t know it was there!) Let me give you a super short non-technical overview of what it is, how to use it, and how it can help put money in your pocket.

Speed Matters

In short, website quality and performance has a direct impact on revenue. Faster pages translate to better search engine rankings, better user retention, and fewer bounced (or annoyed) visitors. There is a ton of data that makes it clear that people will not stick around waiting for your site or application to load for more than a second or two.

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When you hire a team to create software for you, the amount of effort put into initial planning is often what determines the project’s ultimate success or failure. An essential yet often overlooked part of that planning is the methodology chosen to manage the project itself. As a formal discipline, project management has been around for generations. But radical new techniques for managing projects—especially software projects—have been evolving at breakneck speed for the last two decades. Selecting the wrong management approach can lead to blown budgets, delayed delivery, low-quality software, and even outright failure.

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Cloud 101 for Founders!

If you are a non-technical entrepreneur or founder planning on developing software in 2021 and beyond, you need a crash course on cloud computing. A good portion of your operating cost is likely to get paid to a cloud vendor. That alone should get your attention.

Many of the decisions you make as you develop your software product will need to consider cloud provider services and pricing. The more you know, the better you will be at making fundamental decisions that ultimately impact:

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Should I Outsource?

After observing over a hundred offshore, outsourced software development projects over two decades, I’ve seen numerous successes and far too many failures.

Offshore outsourcing is no longer an “early adopter” trend. There is a mature software development outsourcing industry, and many lessons learned about what works and what doesn’t. If you are trying to decide if you should outsource or what aspect of software development you should outsource, it makes sense to ask, “what scenarios have the best chance of success?”

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This article looks like it will be technical, but it won’t be. If you are a founder or investor in web-based software, and especially if you are using an outsourced development team, this two-minute security check is for you!

I want to show you two dead-simple online tests that will give you a bit of insight into the security configuration of your website. Then I want to talk about how you can use these tests’ results to communicate with your software development and operations teams more effectively. I want to teach you about these simple-to-use tools and show you how I use them to achieve better outcomes from outsourced software development teams.

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What is a Product Roadmap, and why do I need one?

Product Roadmaps are high-level strategic plans that help create alignment among everyone involved in creating a product. That can include software developers, designers, marketing, sales, customer support, investors, and others.

The Product Roadmap shows everyone on the team how we expect the product to grow and mature over time and how this impacts their day-to-day work. The Product Roadmap decodes strategic decisions and turns them into clear, actionable, tactical plans. These plans provide high-level direction for software development teams and all the other stakeholders to do their part to create success for the product.

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