Any PM or technical leader who’s led the charge of building a digital product knows that product engineering is one of the most expensive elements of business. In most cases, actually building software should be the last avenue that companies explore to deliver great products, as software engineering, data science and product development are complex, uncertain and hard to manage.

1. The Product Dev Conundrum:
To Build or Buy in a Digital World?
Mark Ridley Eve Lyons-Berg
With: Moderated by:
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2. OpenText Confidential. ©2020 All Rights
Reserved. 2
The OpenText OEM Program takes a solution-centric
approach
Creation
Destruction
Store, Manage & Migrate
All applications create, process, and/or
route information. OEM Content
Management solutions provide the
means and ends for this information to
be migrated, organized, and stored
within an application.
Process & Automate
Surviving the digital transformation requires a
move from manual to automatic processes.
Enable the development and optimization of
digital processes – including dynamic case
management – with insight, automation and
data-driven decision making.
Capture & Digitize
Manual data entry is quickly
becoming a thing of the past.
Enable your application to
automatically collect, ingest, and
convert information from the real
world into a format usable in the
digital world.
Analyze, Report & Predict
Decisions are only as effective as the
data that supports them. Add
enterprise-grade, scalable and highly
interactive analytics capabilities to your
products and solutions and empower
users with visualizations, dashboards,
and more.
Integrate & Access
Today’s users expect seamless
connectivity across systems, information
and processes. OEM Integrate & Access
solutions provide fast, reliable access
(direct and remote) between apps and
data sources.
Search & Discover
Critical actions, decisions and
investigations depend on getting the
right information to the right person at
the right time. Powerful search and
discovery capabilities enable users to
locate, freeze and retrieve the necessary
information.
View, Transform & Communicate
Effective communication relies on
information being suitable for its
audience in format, layout and
appearance. Empower users to create,
collaborate on and publish content that
is customized and targeted for the needs
of the audience.
The OpenText OEM technology stack allows Software Companies to add capabilities to your
application from any stage of the information lifecycle.

3. OpenText Confidential. ©2019 All Rights
Reserved. 3
How can Information Management
help my products and services?
Start your Health Check
The Information Advantage Health Check by OpenText helps you
identify the Information Management (IM) technology with the most
potential to enhance your products and services. Using our
comprehensive evaluation framework, OpenText provides you with
critical insight to make key product management decisions about
incorporating IM technology on your roadmaps.
Sample
Report:
Ask the right questions. Build
better solutions.
Complimentary product management advice
from OpenText.
As a product leader today, it is not enough that your solutions solve
the right problems – they must also solve problems the right way. In
today’s world, this means delivering solutions that enable
customers to survive and thrive as they transform to digital
operations and business-models.
IM technology provides the capabilities your end-users need to
empower their digital transformation initiatives. As the Information
Company, OpenText provides the most extensive set of IM
solutions on the globe, and our OEM Program makes this
technology available to you to be incorporated into you offerings,
saving time, money and effort.
Our Information Advantage Health Check assesses your
solutions against key IM capabilities to ensure you ready to be a
Digital Transformation Enabler for your customers.

4. OpenText is the Information Management company, providing organizations access
to world-class technology to help manage their data and content, improving process
and decision-making and unlocking new business opportunities. Our OEM Team
makes this technology available to other software companies to deploy as part of
their own products.
Through the OpenText OEM Program, our partners can customize, extend, embed
and white-label OpenText technology to add critical information management
functionality to their end-user solutions. OpenText OEM technology is categorized
into 7 intuitive solution areas, making it easy to navigate the vast collection of
products that comprise each.

5. The Product Dev Conundrum:
To Build or Buy?
Click on the Questions panel to
interact with the presenters
https://www.ctouniverse.com/frs/13031411/the-product-dev-conundrum--to-build-or-b
uy-in-a-digital-world-
https://www.productmanagementtoday.com/frs/13031411/the-product-dev-conundrum--
to-build-or-buy-in-a-digital-world-

6. About Mark Ridley
Mark Ridley is an entrepreneur and technologist working with startups and corporates to ensure that technology
is used creatively and effectively to support their strategy. Recognized as one of the top ten CIOs in the UK, he
writes and speaks regularly about the use of technology, agile methodologies and digital working.
Mark was the technical co-founder of reed.co.uk, the largest job site in the UK, where he served as technology
director during its growth from four people to over 350. At Reed, he created the internal incubator, Monday Labs,
to seed new business ideas, before leaving to join Accenture to help establish their new innovation hub in Dublin.
From 2017, Mark served as Group CTO of venture builder Blenheim Chalcot, working with CEOs and CTOs
across the portfolio on product and technology strategy. Now at Ridley Industries he advises executive teams,
investors and company boards in industries as diverse as healthcare, education, financial services and publishing.
About Eve Lyons-Berg
Eve works with Aggregage as editor, content marketer, and webinar host on sites including CTO Universe,
Information Management Today, and eLearning Learning. Eve graduated in 2017 from Grinnell College, where she
majored in English and took an eclectic assortment of courses.

7. Creating great products and avoiding
over-engineering

16. M&A
FRANCHISE
WHITE LABEL
FRAMEWORKS
FULLY BESPOKE (ELoC)
MORE LIKE A
BUSINESS
MORE LIKE A
FEATURE

17. SEVERAL
CUSTOMER
RELATIONSHIP
MANAGEMENT
TOOLS
ABOUT 50
CONTENT
MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
LOTS OF SEARCH
ENGINES
LOGGING AND
ANALYTICS TOOLS
EMAIL MARKETING
PLATFORMS
ENTIRE BANKING
PLATFORMS
FIELD WORKER
MANAGEMENT
TOOLS
EVENT
MANAGEMENT
PLATFORMS
LOTS AND LOTS OF
CHATBOTS

21. COST
TIME
How long this will
really take, and
how much it will
actually cost.
How long you expect this
to take, and how much
you think it will cost.

22. “In my experience, software
engineering teams normally take
twice as long as they think to
deliver an MVP, and even then it
won’t usually pass a third party
penetration test first time"
Marcus Corner, CTO

23. ADD CONTENT
RETRIEVE
CONTENT
SEARCH
CLASSIFICATION /
TAGGING
VERSION
HISTORY
PERMISSIONS
MEDIA STORAGE
CUSTOM
CONTENT TYPES
AVAILABILITY
MULTI-LANGUAGE
IN-PLACE
PREVIEWS
WHITE LABEL
AND EVERY
OTHER NEW
FEATURE IS
CUSTOM
BUILT FOR
YOU...

25. PROBLEM
DISCOVERY
MARKET
SCOPING
CREATE
MVP AND
USER TEST
DEVELOP FULL
ROLLOUT
SUPPORT LIVE
PRODUCT
Supporting what you build
usually costs more than
the initial build.

26. “After 29 years in the industry I can say
Maintenance is 60-80% of total cost.
Development is at most 20%”

28. ENGINEERING
RESOURCE
ENGINEERING
RESOURCE
YOUR
TEAM
CLIENT CLIENT CLIENT CLIENT
EVERY CHANGE IS A CUSTOMISATION RESTRICTED BY CONFIGURATION

34. Identity
management
Search
Checkout /
Payment
Your unique
pixie dust
CRM
Email
Marketing Subscriptions

35. Identity
management
Search
CRM
Checkout /
Payment
Email
Marketing
Your unique
pixie dust
Subscriptions

37. Photo by Ibrahim Rifath on Unsplash
THE BEST MODERN
PRODUCT TEAMS
ARE
QUILTMAKERS

38. Regarding Salesforce... in building a product to sell
on to a large group of customers, does it make
sense to tie yourself to a SaaS like Salesforce?

39. Are there any sites or tools you recommend to
investigate products on the market?
Stackshare: https://stackshare.io/
G2 Crowd: https://www.g2.com/
Gartner

40. I have seen cost and subscriptions become an
issue when relying on other technology.
The more dependent you become on their
technology, the more they know they can ask for
more or leave you in a tight spot on requests you
have to scale effectively. How do you avoid this?

41. What are off-the-shelf platforms/services that allow
you to build “customer logged-in areas” and client
specific data when logged-in? —> this is where
most people believe their product is unique and
must developed from scratch
Auth0: https://www.auth0.com/

42. Any recommendations for building an MVP (other
than meeting security/privacy and other ground
rules)

43. When considering whether to rely on 3rd parties is
that you are at the mercy of their decisions and
roadmap.
I’d argue that the most components you
incorporate, the cost and impact of continuously
updating the integration to the 3rd party needs to
be taking into consideration. What is your take on
this?

44. GET IN TOUCH...
@mark_ridley https://uk.linkedin.com/in/markridley@Mark_Ridley

45. The Product Dev Conundrum:
To Build or Buy?
Q&A
Eve Lyons-Berg
With: Moderated by:
Founder, Ridley Industries
Linkedin page: /in/markridley/
Twitter ID: @mark_ridley
Website: https://ridley.co/
Mark Ridley
Editor, Aggregage
Linkedin page: /in/evelyonsberg/
Twitter ID: @ctouniverse
Email: eve@aggregage.com
Website: ctouniverse.com
https://www.ctouniverse.com/frs/13031411/the-product-dev-conundrum--to-build-or-bu
y-in-a-digital-world-
https://www.productmanagementtoday.com/frs/13031411/the-product-dev-conundrum-
-to-build-or-buy-in-a-digital-world-

46. Does a ‘buy’ option even exist? Is it demonstrably cheaper to build than buy?
Is there a strong justification to own the IP? Does this IP solve a problem for other
companies?