By 2022, Gartner predicts that there will be 6.4 billion devices in use next year as smartphones overtake desktop computers. This means that in the not-so-distant future, there will be more smart devices on Earth than people.

What does this mean for today’s technology and tech makers? Even with millions more devices, customers will expect those devices to play nicely with one another. Products will need to be more complex and connected than ever. And maintaining seamless connectivity and performance means development teams will have to keep releasing around the clock.

Here are the four things an organization needs to get there.

They’ll Need a Bigger Set of Use Cases

With so many smart devices in so many homes, ensuring interoperability requires access to an infinite number of device combinations. Even if you found every issue with your product at a given time, the reality is tech environments are continuously evolving, creating new potential interoperability issues all the while. Finding and fixing every issue simply can’t be done.

Engineers need to prioritize the fixes that are going to have the most impact on the most customers. QA testers need expanded test coverage and firsthand validation that these fixes truly work in the real world. And product managers need a guarantee that the product roadmap aligns with the growing wants and needs of their target audience.

To get there, organizations will need a bigger set of use cases to hit as many variations on the technical environments of their customers as possible. A bigger sample size of target market testers means more devices to leverage than a lab could provide; more data and product analytics on how features are being used; and more real-world insight to inform and empower product evolution.

They’ll Need Efficient, High-Performing Products

Behind every clean and user-friendly interface is an incredibly complex product with many moving parts. And all these parts need to work together seamlessly to provide a streamlined user experience.

Customers have come to expect more functionality and value from their tech purchases. Nowadays, tech devices require constant updates, maintenance, and validation to ensure they’re always performing optimally. But it’s not easy to deliver. The complexity of today’s products leaves room for error — and constant iteration means that disruptive issues are harder and more costly to fix the longer they go unnoticed or unaddressed.

They’ll Need Stronger Cross-Departmental Collaboration

What does it take to run a tight ship? A crew that’s united under a common goal. Conflicting priorities drive a wedge between departments, causing friction and slowing things down.

The one unifying factor is the customer; that’s why so many organizations are developing initiatives that rally around customer input. But really getting to know your customers — that is, getting accurate, up-to-date, real-world data and making sure it’s readily available — requires something more efficient and reliable than an endless string of usability sessions.

They’ll Need to Update Faster — Without Losing Quality

The turnaround on today’s technology is fast — faster than we could’ve imagined even ten or fifteen years ago. Companies have adopted Agile to keep up with demands for accelerated speed. But speed isn’t everything. You also need to deliver a high-quality product, one that continues to delight your customers as it evolves over time.

Centercode Leading the Charge

Validating your product with real-world customers is critical to ensuring delight. But doing it at the speed of Agile is impossible with traditional beta processes. Scrambling to recruit qualified testers, splitting energy between different productivity tools, creating project plans without templates, and manually triaging feedback — if there’s any feedback — takes time you just don’t have in a sprint.

We’ve heard this story over and over from countless customers. That’s why we built the Centercode Platform: to make it easy for you to get your target market customers’ insights on using your tech in their real-world environments.

Centercode Delta Tests expand the reach of your QA team with more devices, providing more abundant and nuanced feedback than you’d get inside a lab. The platform uses automation to prioritize the most impactful issues for engineers. And it gives your product managers the data-backed customer insights they need to stay the course or shift focus when absolutely necessary.

With Centercode, you can validate how your product performs with customers continuously, from concept to sunset. As a fully integrated hub for all your customer testing data, it eases the friction of cross-departmental collaboration by producing insights in real-time with no more data silos and no more copying and pasting.

Built on proven processes designed to align with agile development, everything in the Centercode Platform supports the quick turnarounds necessary to stay ahead of your competition. See how we’ve made hundreds of customer testing programs bigger, better, stronger, and faster by requesting a platform demo today.