Introduction
Product management and design are often focused on features, user experience, and delivery timelines. Business continuity (BC), by contrast, is focused on resilience, recovery, and preparedness. When these disciplines intersect, products become not only usable, but dependable under stress. By embedding BC principles into product design, organisations can create systems that withstand disruption and inspire confidence.
Build Resilience into the Foundation
Lesson: Treat resilience as a design principle, not a bolt-on feature.
Anticipate Infrastructure Evolution
The system I designed began as a classic client/server implementation, with most users housed in the same building as the data centre. When the business dynamic changed and users transitioned to offices in three countries, hosting had to evolve. First came a move to a managed datacentre in Europe, with access through Citrix. Ultimately, the system migrated to AWS in Ireland, with access through AppStream.
Each iteration changed the DR/BC approach. And critically, our position deteriorated when moving into managed centres. While they had distinct mechanisms in place, they were not as reactive as our own. The system I designed failed over in less than five seconds. By contrast, the recent AWS outage that impacted so many companies took several hours to rectify, and organisations were unable to failover to backup systems.
Lesson: Technology leaders must understand that while cloud and managed datacentres bring many benefits, they also introduce negatives. BC must remain a primary consideration in a fractured and unpredictable world. Resilience cannot be outsourced without ongoing verification, frequent testing, and clear accountability.
Simplify Recovery Paths
Lesson: Design recovery paths that are intuitive, automated, and require minimal human intervention. Simplicity builds confidence.
Exercise the Full Cycle
Lesson: Test products under stress conditions, not just ideal ones. Exercise not just the “happy path” of features, but the full lifecycle of failure, recovery, and rollback.
Authority and Decision-Making
Lesson: Empower product teams with authority to trigger precautionary actions – rollbacks, failovers, or feature freezes – without waiting for absolute certainty.
Continuous Improvement and Version Control
Lesson: Don’t just patch – verify. Every improvement should be tested under real conditions.
Managing Third-Party Dependencies
Lesson: Identify dependencies early, assess their resilience, and design fallback options. Handing over DR/BC responsibilities to third parties without ongoing verification and frequent testing is a recipe for false confidence.
Conclusion
Business continuity teaches product management and design to think beyond features and delivery. It reminds us that resilience, authority, and simplicity are design principles in their own right. By embedding BC methodology into product development, organisations can create systems that don’t just work – they endure.
The Cayman experience and the AWS outage both illustrate the stakes: resilience deteriorates when control is handed over without discipline. Technology leaders must recognise that cloud and managed datacentres are not automatically safer – they are different, and they demand rigorous continuity planning.
Trusted partners like Tapping Frog bring this perspective into product consultancy, ensuring resilience is not an afterthought but a foundation. The result is products that are not only innovative, but proven under stress, ready for both the expected and the unexpected.
Dare to do better.