Ever since digital transformation has become the norm, product companies are focused on modernizing their products.
Research shows that the product modernization service market will grow at a CAGR of 16.8% by 2025.
There could be several reasons to prioritize product modernization. The most obvious is that the product cannot meet the increasing customer demands. Legacy products could impact customer’s experience severely, and that would have a bad effect on the company’s profits too. According to PwC, 32% of consumers said they would walk away if they had a single bad experience with the product.
To thrive in this ever-evolving, hyper-competitive industry, companies are left with no other choice. It’s modernize or bust!
Product modernization has its own shortcomings. Product owners have to face several challenges –lack of strategies, uncertain support from management, lack of IT budgets, and the reluctance of staff to adapt to changes brought about by the modernized products.
However, the biggest challenge in product modernization is the lack of skilled resources.
Let’s see why it’s causing a bottleneck in modernization efforts and what product owners can do to solve it.
Lack of skilled resources – the biggest challenge for product owners
In recent years, product companies have seen technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics gaining prominence. Products that include these capabilities can leverage them as key differentiators. The AI market is poised to reach $191 billion by2025. Data-driven companies acquire 23 times more customers and are 19 times more likely to be profitable. There are also other factors, such as the need for companies to migrate their workload to the cloud and adopt Agile and DevOps to launch products in the market quickly. Microservices architecture, containerization, open-source technologies have also become a mainstay in these companies.
All these transformations call for an overhaul in legacy systems and business processes and workflows.
While transformation talks were on for quite some time, true urgency came in during the pandemic when everything had to be shifted to the cloud and processes had to rapidly digitize.
According to Gartner’s TalentNeuron survey, skill transformation was becoming a challenge. 53% of companies stated that identifying resources with the right skills was the no.1 challenge for them. 31% of them believed that there was no way to find market-leading skills. This makes the recruitment process lengthy and time-consuming.
Another challenge that companies face is their ageing workforce. Although product modernization requires a workforce that’s open to learning new skills and implementing the changes quickly, it requires the guidance of the aging workforce as no one understands the existing systems, processes, and how they evolved over the years better than them. 63% of the legacy positions have remained unoccupied in the last five years. Even if the company chooses to retrain the existing and new workforce, they will have to invest a lot of time and money. This could potentially delay the modernization process, and the company might lose an opportunity to become an industry leader.
How Can Resource Augmentation Solve The Product Modernization Challenge?
In a resource augmentation model, the company hires tech experts from an expert third-party vendor on a contractual basis.
Unlike outsourcing, where the entire project is delegated to the third-party workforce, resource augmentation adds this workforce as an extension to their existing workforce. These experts could take over part or all the product modernization functions for a specific purpose or initiative.
Other benefits of resource augmentation include:
- Save time on hiring: Resource augmentation companies already have a readymade pool of skilled talent. So, companies can save time and effort on hiring specialists. It is especially useful when there is a severe shortage of skilled resources in a particular country or location.
- Save time and cost on training: As these resources are already domain experts, they would not require in-depth training. However, companies need to provide onboarding to ensure that these resources understand the business, existing systems, and processes well and comply with the company’s policies. This will reduce misunderstanding and enable the resources to work with the existing workforce effectively.
- Reduced costs: Resource augmentation is often cheaper than hiring a new resource when all costs are considered. First, the company saves money on hiring and training. Second, they have to pay only for the time for which services are rendered. They save costs on employee benefits. And if the resources are working in another country, the company could save costs on development, taxes, and legal requirements.
- Easy to scale: As product companies modernize and acquire more customers, they would require more resources. Alternately, they might want to reduce the resources after the modernization process is completed. Resource augmentation allows easy scalability. Companies can increase or reduce the resources depending upon their needs without any hassles.
Conclusion
Finding a resource augmentation company is not an arduous process. But considering that these resources will be fully involved in the modernization process, it’s important to ensure that they are the perfect fit for the company. Here are a few steps to follow to find the right resources for the modernization process:
- First, determine how many resources will be required and their qualifications, experience, job role, etc. Check if the resource augmentation company understands the business requirements and has the right talent pool to complete the modernization process. Specifically, focus on their credentials in the new technology that will drive the product modernization.
- Interview the candidates to assess their capabilities and expertise.
- Ensure that the newly recruited resources understand the business, processes, etc., and integrate them into the team.
- Monitor the performance of the resources and keep communications open to avoid miscommunication or errors in the process.
In this way, companies can leverage the skillsets of the augmented workforce and at the same time, leverage the knowledge and experience of the existing workforce to complete the transition smoothly. Connect with us to know how to make this work to modernize your products!