Stage: Harvest

This is where your product returns back the investment. The focus of this stage is to retain happy and loyal customers, up sell more and get referrals to grow the business. You need very stable operational processes to respond to the customer issues and inquiries. Build and tune your sales and marketing processes to capture a greater market share.

• Scalability Verification: Make sure your application scales as users grow. Explore scale up and scale out strategies while maintaining SLA obligations and efficient cost of operations. #TechArchitecture
• Continuous Improvement Strategy: Rapidly respond to market conditions and learnings to sustain competitive edge. Iteratively improve the product with improve , invent, or buy decisions aligning with business goals and timelines.
• Monitoring & Incident Management: Monitor system health, detect and alert about system malfunctions and failures. While exception monitoring deals with the problems within the product, incident management deals with the problems on the larger stack of software and hardware.
• Hot-fix Process: Define team and process arrangement to release an update to fix a critical or major error while maintaining SLA obligations in production. #DeliveryProcess
• Inbound Marketing Plan: Increase ‘quality’ traffic to the web site by pushing relevant content to the right-minded people via digital marketing channels such as search engine optimization and social media. Continue to help, support and maintain a relationship with both potential and existing customers.
• Lead Nurture Process: Start educating prospects, and build awareness of your organization and its products. Build trust and build a good relationship making it more likely that the potential client will choose you when it’s time to buy.
• Referrals & Up-sales Plan: A plan that makes use of recommendations and word of mouth to grow the product’s customer base through the networks of its existing customers while establishing customer loyalty. Also define how to market higher sales to existing customers (up-sales).
• Technology Revamp/Migration Plan: Roadmap for moving to better technologies to facilitate rapid response process, while boosting security, availability, performance and agility
• Public Relations Activity Plan: Strategize on how to enhance the image of the product brand and focus on influential media strategies.
• Contingency & Reliability Reviews: Plan and act the business continuity strategy to minimize business risks. Consider technical, market and environmental factors. Ensure that various drills are done in readiness. #DeliveryProcess
• Win-lose Analysis: Perform a win loss analysis on your leads to understand why you lost and what are the strong points in your application. Analyze these results with different demographics in mind.