Web as Product

When it comes to building websites, what if companies started treating them as products — using product-management principles to improve speed to market?

Website development speed and its evolution are essential components of the modern digital landscape. Coming from someone who has led and built digital ecosystems for many years, it always amazes me to see organizations treat website redesigns and ongoing optimization as one-off projects rather than something "always on."

Many businesses struggle to keep up with the internet's pace, leaving customers with a slow, buggy, outdated experience. The traditional approach to redesign is a single project with specific objectives — lengthy, spanning research, planning, design, development, and testing that can take months or even years. Building a website as a one-off is fundamentally different from building it as a product.

One way to accelerate is to treat web development like a product. By viewing the website as a product, companies break the work into smaller, manageable tasks, use behavioral data to inform decisions, and apply data-driven insight to optimize for the best possible user experience — keeping pace with a rapidly changing internet and staying ahead of competitors.

Machine-learning algorithms accelerate identifying patterns in user behavior and anticipating needs. For example, businesses can use A/B-testing platforms outside their web structure to identify the most effective changes, then bring user-validated features back to the site — changing the website quickly based on real feedback.

How to Improve Your Website's Speed to Market

1. Keep stakeholders engaged. Keep them in the loop throughout development so they can provide feedback and suggest changes.
2. Adopt DevOps. Develop, test, and release software faster, delivering changes to your web builds quickly.
3. Use Agile methodology. Iterate rapidly through small sprints and releases, adapting to customer feedback and shipping changes faster.
4. Establish a separate A/B-testing platform. Build a catalog of experiments worthy of implementation.
5. Use a flexible, modular architecture with a robust CMS. Make changes and updates quickly and efficiently.
6. Invest in speed. Faster hosting and a content delivery network (CDN) improve website performance.
7. Use automation. Automate asset optimization, code minification, and testing to cut build time.
8. Implement continuous integration and delivery. Streamline development and deploy changes quickly and reliably.
9. Use a modern front-end framework. React or Vue reduce the time it takes to build.

As the online ecosystem grows and evolves, companies must build speed into their production and processes to deliver engaging websites that keep pace with an ever-changing landscape.