Regardless of how innovative or transformative your new offering or healthtech product roadmap may be, delays in launching will significantly affect potential earnings. Even worse, you might miss the market opportunity, ending up chasing a weaker competitor across the finish line.
As highlighted by a McKinsey report, a product that arrives six months late to the market can suffer a 33% reduction in profits over five years. However, releasing a product on schedule, even if its development is 50% over budget, only leads to a 3.5% drop in profit. In the world of product development, time is indeed money.
So, does this mean faster is always better? Not if the focus on speed compromises the values you bring to your customers. Speeding up your healthtech product roadmap, in another way of speaking, is changing your team’s priorities and making decisions that benefit both your customers and your business objectives.
With that being said, this article will be the comprehensive guide you need to accelerate your product roadmap without sacrificing quality, clarity, and alignment.
Why Most Healthtech Product Roadmaps Fail
The title above may give the impression of clickbait, but rest assured, we won’t simply list the reasons why most roadmaps fail to provide a clear path from point A to point B for a product. A quick internet search will yield numerous articles outlining common issues, such as missed deadlines and poor document versioning.
Interestingly enough, many of these articles seem to agree on a key problem: a healthtech product roadmap being seen as nothing more than a mere list of features. While this notion might catch your attention at first, these articles often fall short of explaining why having a company-wide communicated list of expected features can be problematic.
The real problem is not that a roadmap is only a list of features, but that its list of features is disconnected to the company’s goals, objectives, and build-cycle speed. This is the underlying roadblock behind most roadmaps’ failure.
8 Strategic Techniques To Speed Up Your Healthtech Product Roadmap
Once your team adopts the above value-based mindset, efficiency becomes about building a product roadmap that executes quickly, while considering scalability. Here are some tactics to help you create a product roadmap that is agile, effective, and accelerated.
1. Set Strategic Objectives
When developing a product roadmap, we often believe we’re making strategic choices about features and functions. However, upon closer examination, we may find that these decisions are driven by instinct and bias. For commercial-grade software, these types of roadmaps are not always helpful or adhered to in the long term, causing confusion throughout the development process.
Here is our advice: Before establishing a detailed healthtech product roadmap, it is essential to list out your company’s business goals over a timeline. The roadmap will now consist of various initiatives and tactics, all aimed at achieving that goal. Clearly define all objectives, execute them effectively, scale the results, and make necessary refinements. In this way, your teams who run these initiatives and tactics can shift their focus to achieving the goals rather than just completing the projects.
While it may take time at first, a detailed and coherent roadmap will prove to be truly worthwhile in clearly communicating product objectives, ramping up the best team, and managing productivity, therefore accelerating the whole development phase.
2. Prioritize Goal-Based Features
Your roadmap can just be a list of features; it’s okay. Organizations usually don’t build one thing at a time, so the most common roadmap is more epic-based than story-based. However, each feature the developers work on must be tied directly to a company goal. To break that down, focus on high-conversion features that offer the greatest value to your customer and hold the potential to actually grow revenue.
This goal-based approach is critical in today’s climate of value-based care, patient-centered outcomes, and MACRA, where it’s incredibly tempting to toss products and features onto the product roadmap because they check a buzzword box but, in reality, don’t impact your larger mission.
Developers often find it frustrating to work on products that don’t progress or get taken away without clear reasoning. In this regard, having a healthtech product roadmap without a clear purpose can lead to burnout among talented (and costly) developers, with little to show for it. By explaining the ROI, purpose, and plan for each feature on your healthcare technology roadmap, you can save time, and energy, and potentially benefit your entire organization.
3. Endorse Agile Methodologies
The primary objective of agile methodologies in product management is to swiftly deliver value to customers, which perfectly aligns with our aim of accelerating the product roadmap.
Consider this method as highly flexible, prioritizing continuous development, which enables your team to modify your plan and tactics while you progress through the product creation and deployment process. To start, establish an agile roadmap with monthly or quarterly objectives. These targets are not set in stone – they can and should be frequently revised to address changes.
However, the key to agile within software development is adaptability. To become agile, healthcare software development teams must concentrate on customer involvement. Encouraging client feedback and communication throughout the development process will lead to greater inherent value in the final product.
4. Empower Your Product Teams
Accelerating your product roadmap requires more than just strategic planning. It’s essential to have a development team with a product-focused mindset.
But what does it mean to be product-minded? A product mindset directs focus toward creating real value for the users, rather than arbitrary milestones. Developers with this mindset actively strive to understand every product decision, study user interactions, and contribute to shaping product strategies. A product-minded development team will help you map out what it takes to design an optimum product within a condensed timeframe, instead of hastily coding a solution to meet basic requirements.
However, not every company has the resources to establish a product-minded development team in a limited amount of time. In such cases, partnering with a reliable healthcare software outsourcing company like KMS Healthcare can prove highly advantageous, particularly in terms of time and cost savings. Our specialized resources help healthcare technology companies:
- Boost productivity: By leveraging the expertise of our healthcare specialists, you can shift your focus towards your core business functionalities. Lower your time to market, beat competitors, and better serve your customers.
- Obtain valuable skills and competencies: Building a product requires much higher attention to thinking across architecture, deployment, and design flexibility aspects. We can provide you with experienced professionals who have a wide variety of niche skill sets and extensive healthcare domain knowledge.
- Reduce internal recruiting costs: Technical and development positions take more than 40 days to fill, resulting in significant time and financial burdens associated with internal recruiting. With our help, you can ramp up development immediately without languishing until the right employees come along. Additionally, we offer comprehensive expertise and a suite of tools to assist you in developing an effective budget plan that optimizes all necessary costs, including personnel and equipment expenses.
Understanding your strengths, and limitations and knowing when to create reliable third-party relationships for product development will help your business scale and succeed faster, often at a more affordable price.
5. Validate Product Viability Through MVP Development
An MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, represents your product’s bare-bones version, which only incorporates the most essential features. The philosophy behind MVP development is speed: launching your product swiftly, shortening development cycles, and rapidly gathering customer feedback.
The primary purpose of an MVP is to get your product in front of customers as soon as possible and test how well it fits their needs. This initial experience provides valuable insights that can help you make improvements or even completely revamp your product if needed. When you’re creating an MVP, it’s important to avoid overcomplicating things and causing delays, as this can lead to being left behind in the fast-paced market.
Learn more about applying MVP in healthcare: What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and How To Apply It To the Healthcare Industry
6. Use Automation and Integrate Key Technologies into Your Healthtech Product Roadmap
Competition in healthcare has grown fierce; hence, staying ahead of the market requires innovative approaches.
- Automation excels at streamlining repetitive and time-consuming tasks that are inherent in the product development process. By automating tasks such as data entry, report generation, testing, and deployment, automation becomes a lifeline, freeing up employees and saving considerable time. With the ever-increasing volume, velocity, and diversity of healthcare data, embracing automation has become indispensable to stay in sync.
- Integrating key technologies such as major EHRs and existing technologies into your product can significantly hasten your time to market. Such integration provides a unified platform that centralizes data storage, reducing the need for laborious manual checks and ensuring that data remains up-to-date and accessible. This streamlined process not only enhances operational efficiency but also expedites the development and launch of your product. By incorporating existing technologies, you leverage proven solutions, thereby minimizing the time and resources spent on developing features from scratch.
The benefits of automation and integration are clear: improved time-to-market, enhanced accuracy and quality, increased efficiency and productivity, and seamless collaboration. Embracing these technologies is not only a strategic move but a necessity for healthcare software companies aiming to accelerate their healthtech product roadmap.
7. Track Results and Improve Continuously
A product road map is not a static document but a living artifact that evolves with your product and market. Regularly reviewing and updating your product roadmap can help you monitor your progress, measure your impact, and adjust your plans.
You can use the product’s established key performance indicators (KPIs), including customer feedback, user behavior, market trends, and business outcomes, as a guide to quantify the success or failure of the product and make changes as needed.
Measuring your process and product results can help your organization better align new offerings to consumers’ expectations while accelerating your development process and quickly entering the market. Remember, a product roadmap is never a destination but a journey that helps you stay relevant, responsive, and resilient.
8. Keep Eyes on Regulatory Compliance
In the healthcare industry, strict regulations and standards are in place to safeguard patient safety, protect sensitive data, and ensure the integrity of healthcare solutions. Incorporating regulatory compliance measures into the healthtech product roadmap is essential to avoid legal issues, reputational damage, and potential delays in product development and launch.
Compliance considerations should be integrated into every stage of the roadmap, from initial design and development to testing, deployment, and ongoing maintenance. Ensuring your product and features are HIPAA compliant, HITECH compliant, or any other compliance requirements is the key to success.
While it’s not likely to be an exciting topic, you still need to find regulatory experts who can provide guidance on interpreting and implementing compliance requirements into building (and maintaining) your roadmap. Make sure you involve the right people so you don’t have to backpedal down the road, or you may risk having to rework your whole product roadmap.
Supercharge Your Healthtech Product Roadmap with KMS Healthcare!
The journey to market a successful healthtech product poses numerous challenges. However, by implementing strategies such as user focus, agility, MVP development, and integration of automation and key technologies, you can adeptly navigate these obstacles. Remember, your product roadmap is a dynamic entity that should evolve with market needs and technological advancements. It signifies a continual journey of improvement, not a one-off event. These strategies will expedite your product development process, enable you to deliver a product that truly meets market needs, and provide an edge in the competitive healthcare technology industry.
Locating expert software developers with healthcare expertise can be challenging, with lengthy software development, testing, and QA cycles potentially slowing your time to market. However, KMS Healthcare, with 14+ years of experience, offers innovative, tailored solutions, industry expertise, and a track record of customer satisfaction. Our team accelerates your product roadmap, bringing your offerings to market faster. We can customize our collaboration model to suit your specific needs, be it onboarding developers for a startup or forming a long-term partnership.
Schedule a free consultation with us now to accelerate your healthtech product roadmap.
