Competitive advantage

Are you focussing on developer productivity? If not, read why you should.

Technology is getting commoditized. In the yesteryears, you could have counted on your software frameworks and technologies, hardware prowess, access to capital and talent pool as competitive advantages. In a world, which is getting commoditized, the access to these has been democratized, thus leveling the playing field. Today, it does not matter whether you are a single person startup or a large multinational corporation; everyone has access to the same resources.

Cloud providers ensure you have enough servers and hardware at your disposal to meet growing demands. Open source frameworks and technologies provide the technological backbone to build stuff. Umpteen services exist to recruit talent and develop products; co-working spaces take care of physical office requirement; social media gives you access to a wide audience. In spite of these, if you are short on capital or want to splurge, there is the ever-growing VC industry to take care of your capital needs. The icing on the cake are sites like Stackoverflow and Coursera which have levelled the playing field when it comes to access to knowledge.

In light of this, what constitutes your business competitive advantage?

One short answer, developer productivity.

Developer productivity dictates how well you can effectively and efficiently leverage all the resources at your disposal to build a great product and trounce your rivals. Developer productivity is a trifecta of having the right engineering tools, structure and processes. When you excel in these three, developers can move fast, and business can conquer markets with ease.

Developer productivity is too vast a topic to be covered in one post. I will be writing more on this in the coming months; it is an area which is extremely close to my heart, and I firmly believe companies do not focus enough on this.

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