All companies challenge themselves on being placed among the key players in the world of features. A world that knows no limits or finish lines and can be very complex, yet, may offer huge opportunities for innovation and creativity.

Companies achieve the challenge of being influential in this competitive world, by offering unrivaled, effective, and unique features as their competitive advantage. There are endless potentials that businesses are constantly discovering, in order to create their one-of-a-kind product scope.

However, during this continuous exploration, the businesses that truly distinguish and thrive, in the world of features, are the ones who deep dive into the needs and the demands of the customers. By understanding their customers’ pain points, behaviors, and preferences, businesses can develop features to meet their customers’ needs and provide unique user experiences.

The core mission of the teams, who are responsible for “mapping” the customers’ behavior and reaction, is to create the ultimate features that will provide the most entertaining, engaging, and exceptional experience. There is no one-size-fits-all roadmap, for one to take to lead in the world of features. A roadmap based on a customer-centric approach to feature development, seems always to be the case of success, so that businesses can create products and services with unique selling propositions for their customers.

Product Roadmap

The first step that one should take is to align their product roadmap with the user journey, to satisfy possible users’ needs. Each roadmap is planned for specific products or verticals, as needs come to become more specific and irrelevant between those. 

User Stories

The next step is the most crucial for a successful product: describe why it is important to create the features and how to create them. From its business value up to a final solution design, a user story includes all the information needed about the functionality, configuration considerations, or acceptance criteria of a particular feature. Even though this is referred to as the most difficult task, that the teams are asked to complete, there is one interesting tip that tends to make features more interesting and engaging: Write the user story as elaborately as possible, with specific and clear points.

Gamification-Localization-Personalization

The on-top flavor of a product feature. The teams who work for the scope of the product should always have in mind how a product feature can become more powerful and address USPs. Adding-value characteristics are the ones to differentiate against the competition and provide a more entertaining and unique user experience. Digital Frontends are the ones to reflect the value that derives from scoping features, including innovative user journeys, which eventually lead to higher user engagement.

Commoditized Product Features

This is the next phase that teams should follow in their roadmap: reconsidering the commoditized betting products, by offering unique characteristics on top of base-product flavor. Modernized Digital Frontend features, that coexist with a highly performant platform, are one of the key combined areas for serving a top-quality experience.

3rd Party Product Features

A vital part of this product strategy is, also, the 3rd party providers, who offer content or microservices that are capable of boosting a certain area of an operator’s offering, or satisfying a specific need, in the best way possible. Their specialization profile allows them to offer innovative solutions around smaller bits of the teams’ portfolio, by exploring and predicting the future of a certain gameplay flow, with a faster pace, and what would be the most innovative and ideal way to deliver extraordinary products.   

By surfacing the actual needs of recreational punters, new customer behaviors can be introduced into the digital world and bridge another gap between users’ expectations and operators’ offerings.

The mission of the Product and Development team at a glance

The Product and Development teams are responsible for handling the features and bringing them to life, getting outside of their comfort zone, and adapting quickly to technologies’ latest practices. Market research and capturing opportunities for creative processes, come as a prerequisite, to staying motivated, surpassing themselves, and not being outdated.

From concept to launch of features, the Product and Development team are fully aligned, in every day process to achieve excellence. These processes include the following stages:

1. Ideation: It’s all about brainstorming ideas and concepts.
   This is the primary stage to generate, develop and refine new ideas. Detecting of the ideal features, arise from market research, trends analysis, and feedback from customers.
   
   
2. Design: Translation of the idea.
   It’s the step in which the visualization of the product happens. User-centric design is always crucial to develop a visually appealing design, consistent with your brand and message, before proceeding to mockups and prototypes.
   
   
3. Development: The implementation of the design concept.
   In this stage, all teams work on building the feature using coding, testing, and debugging techniques. Teams should come up with decisions on the technology to be used and the methodology to be followed, emphasizing on agile development, eliminating threats, and optimizing the performance.
   
   
4. Testing: Ensuring that all goes according to plan.
   In this crucial step, teams define testing objectives, develop comprehensive test plans, and conduct functional and non-functional testing, while they use issue-tracking tools to optimize the validation of features.
   
   
5. Launch: Say hi to the public!
   The teams introduce the service to the market, unveiling it to plausible customers. The rollout of the product embodies the creation of a launch plan, through the most effective channels, to generate buzz. It is more than important to apply usage metrics and trial conversions to assess the success of the launch and solicit user feedback, to track areas for improvement, ensuring that it remains relevant

Overall, we are living in a world where businesses are highly competitive and constantly evolving, to be among the key players. By developing new technologies, focusing on user experience, and gaining a competitive advantage through immersive features, these companies can drive business growth and remain at the forefront of their industry.