As never before, the most decisive factor affecting the competitiveness of many companies is their capacity for innovation. Questioning and evolving business models, responding quickly to competitive moves, collaborating with other complementary companies, and effectively testing and validating new ideas have proven to be key strategies in a relevant set of industries.
At the heart of these innovation processes are the people who, with their creativity, knowledge and talents, provide companies with the possibility of generating new ideas and initiatives. However, it is not enough to have people with these characteristics, as it is essential that there is also a virtuous work process that allows collaboration and empowerment of the different roles, which must share the same objectives and, ideally, similar values.
In the past, many of these ideas and innovations never prospered, as they required technology and know-how that were beyond the reach of many companies. It has been technological advances and the new digital economy that have made these capabilities available to all.

It is the union of virtuous innovation processes and accessible technology that allows the initiatives generated to be carried out, producing an important leap in the competitiveness of many companies. It is important not to see the innovation process and technology as independent items; they must be intertwined and complement each other at different layers and levels in order to produce the expected synergy.

Regarding the innovation process, in the last decade the concept of Agility has come into vogue, understood as the ability and willingness of an organization to adapt, create and leverage change for the benefit of its customers. When incorporating Agility, companies must introduce new ways of addressing objectives, which must be aligned with the company’s vision, mission and strategy.
Within Agile, one of the most used frameworks is Scrum, which is oriented to find emerging practices in complex domains, such as software project management in innovation environments. There are other agile frameworks, which can contribute in different contexts and realities.

In no case does Scrum pretend to be a methodology, so it does not detail ways of operating, but generates a relational and iterative context, of constant inspection and adaptation so that all those involved in the project, either directly or indirectly, can create their own process, given that in a complex context the results become unpredictable.
It is the team involved who will find the best way to solve your problems. These types of solutions will be emerging. Within the Scrum methodology there is a list of activities or functions that each of the roles must develop, such as generating a product idea, validating it with an MVP and evolving it over time.

Some of the characteristics of the Scrum methodology are:
– Rapid creation, validation and discarding of new ideas
– Use of MVPs for light process and low-cost learning
– Use of canary deployment and A/B testing, to show ideas to a set of customers and learn from them.
– Data collection, processing and use of data
– Monitor the performance of the initiative, both technically and commercially.

Most of the aforementioned actions of the innovation process require to be supported by technology that is designed for it. Technology that structures services in different layers with the intention of delivering agility and control at the same time.

The Scrum methodology identifies the different roles that participate in an agile team during the lifecycle of an initiative, among which are the Product Owner, the development team, the support team, the stakeholders and the customers.

The Product Owner is interested in promoting ideas and initiatives to stakeholders and that it is possible to validate them quickly and efficiently, in an agile way, starting with an MVP and that this can evolve according to the learning process with customers and product indicators. When some ideas are not entirely clear, it is possible to ask customers for help in deciding the best option, for which A/B Testing type strategies can be used.

The Development Team, as well as the Product Owner, is interested in the quality of the delivered product. For this purpose, they carry out exhaustive tests in controlled environments before going into production. Depending on the level of criticality and the internally defined process, it is possible to perform tests in a production environment through Canary Deplyment strategies.

Every development must contain metrics that allow us to know the health of the solution. Along with this, it is also interesting to have metrics regarding the business that supports the solution, that is, not only to know if the platform is working well or not, but also what effects it is having on the users/customers: Are they buying, what do they prefer from what we offer, are sales better with the new products? This is of interest to the Support Team, the Product Owner and certainly to the Stakeholders.

Technology that delivers agility – APIs and Microservices

As already mentioned, the agile innovation process requires technology that structures the services in different layers and facilitates connectivity between them. Whether using SOAP or REST protocols, services must expose their capabilities through APIs so that others can take advantage of them. With clearly defined APIs and the possibility of knowing all the capabilities exposed, different teams can take their creativity forward and exploit reuse and collaboration.

The use of APIs also enables collaboration with other companies, making it possible to leverage the capabilities available outside the organization.

While API-based architectures allow layering and communication of services, microservices, which restrict each service to specific capabilities exposed by APIs, are increasingly being used as a development pattern.

APIs and microservices are not only forms of development, but also serve to drive and advocate for an agile service generation strategy, as it forces teams to clearly define the purpose of each service and enable its reuse.

 

Reevolute Builder

Reevolute Builder is a Reevolute product that allows the creation of microservices in a graphical way, and the communication between them and other entities through the use of APIs. It is a tool that allows addressing each of the aspects mentioned in this use case in a simple way and without the need for large development teams. It allows to quickly consolidate an idea into a digital solution that can be made available to users/customers, testing the idea and validating what has been done under metrics established for the solution.