As a product developer, many tools and software are useful to have available in your technology stack. The benefit of using such tools can help make the development process more efficient and hopefully guide your product to a successful launch.
SaaS tools can be utilized in various ways when it comes to your role as a developer. Without these tools, you may find yourself underperforming and seeing your business operations transcend into chaos. These tools can provide order for the most part but will ultimately make your work as a developer easier and more efficient.
This article will share five essential SaaS tools that every developer should have in their digital toolkit for 2021.
Table of Contents
AbstractAPI to Retrieve Important Data
For any team member involved in the product’s production, it’s useful to have access to data and use data analytics for more informed decision-making. When it comes to Application Programming Interfaces, there are three main types; private, partner, and public.
The public APIs are the easiest to access, but they can be a little more tricky to access for partner ones. Extracting any data type that might help improve your product’s value and effectiveness on the market is key. According to Harvard Business School, the biggest problem companies face when launching a new product is a lack of preparation.
There are benefits from collecting data to influence the success of the launch and ensure that what you’re putting on the market is something your customer needs.
With that being said, AbstractAPI can provide powerful data that can automate certain tasks and enhance the user experience that your customers will eventually receive. It’s a simple tool to implement and has access to a huge library of APIs. From IP Geolocation to phone and PHP email address validation.
APIs can increase productivity, improve connectivity and collaboration, while more importantly, enhancing your customer’s experience of the product.
See More: What is the Windows API?
Jira for Product Management
Atlassian’s Jira is a great one for product management, and as a developer, you’ll be part of the overall process. Knowing what you need to work on and any changes can be updated through Jira. There are challenges that many projects can face when building a project.
Jira Align provides a collaborative roadmap document that gathers all the information you need in one place. It also helps communicate the strategy aligned with what you and the team are delivering.
As a developer, you need to ensure that everything you do, aligns with the budget, vision, and goals of the project as a whole.
There are some great features with Jira when it comes to product development. Some of these features include:
- Sprint team analytics – Statistics such as team emotion, spring goals, and velocity.
- Quality management – provides a visual snapshot of quality for each product line per release, including any defect or test case breakdowns.
- Retrospectives – Progress reviews to help the team derive ideas and to improve the process.
- Detailed team progress – With sprint progress metrics, helps the team discover the time used and scope increases that contribute to the delivery of tasks.
The tool helps all team members of the project with end-to-end visibility, which helps deliver more effective communications and maintains any strategy in place.
Zoom for Team Meeting and Development
Communication is key when it comes to any project that involves more than one person working on it. With some product developments, you may have to interact with colleagues from design or marketing, communicate with any outsourced parties, and keep your stakeholders happy.
The product manager may choose to hold regular meetings to oversee what progress is being made from the developers to those marketing the product for launch. PMs spend around 52% of their time on unplanned fire-fighting activities.
Having a tool like Zoom can help communicate and help preempt the problems that could occur and do damage control for things that have already happened.
There are plenty of perks for using Zoom as a developer. It’s great for conducting presentations to your product management or other team members or stakeholders. The screens are great for presenting and as software, it’s got plenty of flexible plans and packages to suit what you require.
Parlor for Customer Feedback
As a developer, data is a great way of understanding what the customer needs from the product you’re developing. When you provide your users with more value on what they spend, they’re more likely to buy from you again. Creating that brand loyalty is key to maintaining the success of your products.
There are lots of ways that Parlor works to collect feedback. It monitors customer accounts, tracks their progress, and reports on any needs that haven’t been met. It can also identify key risk indicators early enough to take action before it’s too late.
Parlor takes charge of the customer lifecycle, whether onboarding them to recognizing what they need from future products. The platform can also integrate with other tools such as Jira, Zendesk, and Slack.
Github for Building Code
The SaaS market is currently growing by 18% each year. That means more and more organizations are utilizing SaaS tools to help build their businesses. For developers, code is an important part of building a product, whether it’s an app, website, or software. Github is one of many SaaS tools that are used for building code.
A million developers and companies use Github as a development platform for building, shipping, and maintaining their software. There are many advantages to using Github as the go-to for coding, and it offers collaborative opportunities if you’re one of many developers working on the product in question.
The platform also uses automation for everything, whether that’s CI/CD, testing, project management, issue labeling, onboarding, and more. It’s one that also creates and scales best practices as well as keeping everything secure and compliant.
Github does more than just offer a space for creating code; and it helps encourage collaboration and creates a community when building code.
Also, You Can Read 12 Marketing Tools That Will Help to Achieve Business Goals
The Benefits of SaaS Tools
SaaS tools, in general, have many benefits, whether you’re using them as a developer or collectively as a business. Using SaaS across many areas of your business can be helpful for all those who get to use them.
It’s affordable for all organizations
Regardless of your budget, whether it’s a small or large-scale project, SaaS software is a lot more affordable than you think. Most operate on a subscription service, so you don’t need to worry about being contractually tied into software for longer than a month at a time. SaaS subscription models make it a lot more financially viable because there are no up-front costs that price out those smaller businesses or start-ups.
Easy to implement and deploy
Whenever you introduce a new system or way of working, it usually throws off your employees or sends the organization into disarray. With SaaS solutions, they’ve been developed and created for use online via your web browser. There are very few that would need anything other than a web browser and online access. It makes it easier to implement into your business and deploy across all relevant employees who will use it.
Flawless updates and upgrades
As a SaaS, any updates and upgrades are done without you needing to do anything. That means no installing or downloading patches to update the software. It saves you the time of having to wait for these updates or upgrades to install, and you can be assured that when you access the software online, you’ve got the most recent, up-to-date version available.
Great customer service and support
According to Hubspot Research, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service. For any business looking to invest in SaaS software, you can rest assured that many SaaS tools will offer the very best in client service and support.
SaaS service providers need to guarantee that their application is accessible and understood by all those who use it. If it isn’t, then there’s a duty of care that these providers need to give to retain those clients and avoid them going elsewhere.
Compatability
Integration is an effective way for a business to streamline a lot of its processes, including product development. A lot of the SaaS tools you’ll come across will have the capability to combine with other SaaS tools. This can help centralize a lot of the work your company is doing and ultimately bring more of the workforce closer together.
Suitable for remote working
Remote working is on the rise, and with many projects that involve product development, not all your staff will be in the same place at the same time. That’s why a SaaS tool is so useful because it can be accessed anywhere and at anytime. There’s no need to have your desktop or laptop to hand, with many having mobile applications for those on the go.
Check Out the Quick Video Review On SaaS Ideas
Source: TK Kader
Conclusion
Every developer can benefit from SaaS tools when it comes to product development. Not only does it help with improving efficiency, but it also brings together the rest of the organization involved in the project.
Here are a few more topics that you shouldn’t miss:
12 Most excellent B2B Mobile Apps for Managing Your Business on the Go
How to Automate your Work with Zapier and WPForms
Github: One of the Best Development Platform
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