Characteristics of a successful product

1. The product is a solution to the real needs or real problem faced by a lot of people.
2. The product is intuitive and simple for people to use. Humans are lazy and if your product is not easy to work with, they will stop working with it.
3. The product user experience should be world-class. Better to use good usability designers and mockup screens before you start developing your product.
4. the visual design of the product. Please show attention to detail and attract the users to make use of the features.
5. the reliability of the product. End users hate inconsistency. even if an error happens and the error occurs consistent, users might excuse and try work around for shorter time duration, but not inconsistency.
6. There is not point in building more and more features unless you can take a working product(prototype), demonstrate to customers and get feedback.

Barriers to move forward

Barriers are caused when we perform something more important than achieving strategic goals. they arrive due to some of the below reasons.

1.. Information Flow : Information is inaccessible to all and the only available information is understood with wrong perspectives.
2. Short-term thinking : This happens when a decision is made in haste or when longer term concerns are well known but rationalized away or never thought of long term strategy.
3. Misalignment: This happens when there is a general lack of united strategy and people are not taking efforts to come to be on same page
4. Fear:  all of the above cause fear which invaribaly drives people to become selfish and creates walls between groups.

As barriers are created internally, they can be knocked down internally. It surely cannot happen without a strong support from the top, in addition to commitment and participation from all. Removing barriers takes courage and acceptance of the fact that some removal may cause short-term pain and all should sign to take short-term pain for long term benefit to make working together happier.

Book marking the article

Five Mistakes to Avoid When Developing Cloud Apps
Copying the contents here for my reference.

1. Using traditional application architectures
2. Ignoring how cost is impacted by architecture decisions
3. Relying on human rather than automated workflows
4. Ignoring operational lock-in risk
5.Not leveraging purpose-built middleware and tooling