Business alignment in a professional manner for any software development team is the key to a successful transformation of the business in meeting the client goals and project success. Projects should have unambiguous communication strategies aligning perfectly with the business and technical teams.

There are established guidelines enumerated below to establish precise and efficient communication strategies.

Discovery phase

Any digital service provider essentially engages in a comprehensive discussion with the client to understand the following:

• Clients long term and short-term goals
• Client expectations
• Users types, customer segments
• Users digital maturity
• Customer engagement channels like desktop, mobile, chat, social media, SMS, and others

A clear understanding and collaboration during the discovery phase will lay a healthy foundation for establishing clear objectives for all the stakeholders like

• Programmers
• Coders
• QA testers
• Business managers and down the line

The development team can be very effective and can deliver timely results when the KPIs, goals, and metrics are aligned properly.

Establish end-user persona

Establishing personas is a starting point for signaling and aligning common behavior patterns that help in prioritizing some essential features in the project to generate a positive result. Understanding the behavior pattern of the potential customer whether a B2B or B2C buyer will help in channelizing efforts of all in the most appropriate direction to meet the common goals of all. For this we need to logically answer some key queries:

– What type of customers?

Product development can be planned and prioritized based on the characteristics of the customer like

• Premium subscribers
• Early adopters
• Organic traffic
• Returning customers
• Cold leads

– How do we address user pain points?

It’s always better to lay stress on alleviating the user pain points from the beginning of the development phase. This is more result-oriented than focussing more on the need of some specific customer or certain demographic target. The objective is to offer a better user experience than the competitor.

– What influences the buying decisions?

With analysis of all the organic data of the pre-existing customers and from other sources a realistic customer-driven approach can be established to identify the influencing factors that propel customers to convert and buy.

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

After the discovery and persona phases, careful attention is laid to any assumptions made. To gain real-world experience a small-scale prototype project delivery schedule is planned quickly. During this stage, each person involved in the project including the test users will carry on interaction with the prototype and provide their feedback. The data is reviewed discussed and the outcome is embraced in the next stage for validation. This includes:

– First interaction

Identify the first goals during the first stage of interaction with the subject brand. The actions required to meet user satisfaction must be incorporated into the technology to give better support and user experience.

– Mapping the customer journey

Positioning self in the shoes of the user gives first-hand experience of the website, feature, app, or product.

– Analyzing the competitor

Ascertaining the competitor’s product and their present positioning in the market provides the baseline data. This helps in designing the strategy to position the project for the target users that can create more impact and fruitful results.

Proactive Development Process

When the stage for final development comes, then all the proactive development measures are adopted daily with all the team members to keep them up to date.

Living Documentation

Living documentation practice is established to keep abreast technical and the business management team of all the developments in the business. Living documentation professional services shall include:

• Continuous update
• Automated Test reporting
• Project management summaries easily accessible to all

Collaboration and Communication Tools

To be effective it is necessary to implement highly rewarding collaboration and communication tools to maintain all people including remote teams involved on the same platform. Expert developers can help in providing and maintaining the said tools for effective communication on the following platforms:

• Group chat messengers –like Slack will integrate all communication layers into the chat via chatbots
• Effective project management platform—is the key that signifies project backlogs, task lists, development features, documentation, and many more vital findings that are stored in an easily accessible place.
• Collaborative prototype tools— involve all stakeholders in making aware of how the feature or the app will work.

It may not be an ideal situation wherein every project all are perfectly aligned but sustained development and good communication channel shall be in place to achieve the result and meet business goals.